Envoy Proxy
What is Envoy Proxy?
Envoy Proxy is a modern, high performance, small footprint edge and service proxy. Envoy is most comparable to software load balancers such as NGINX and HAProxy. Originally written and deployed at Lyft, Envoy now has a vibrant contributor base and is a graduated Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.
Envoy Proxy was designed to be programmatically managed from the get-go, with advanced gRPC-based APIs for management. In addition, Envoy Proxy is optimized for elastic, distributed application environments with key features such as resilience (e.g., timeouts, retries, circuit breaking), observability, and real-time service discovery.
Impact on Today
Envoy Proxy has become the core data engine for many popular cloud-native projects including Edge Stack (API Gateway), Istio (service mesh), and Amazon AppMesh (service mesh). In addition, Envoy Proxy is deployed directly in many organizations including Google, Lyft, IBM, and AirBnb.