Envoy - The most widely used service proxy for cloud-native
Envoy
Working with a modern complex service-oriented architecture involves a lot of challenges with network and applications
To solve such problems, developers often require networks to be more transparent
In case you also face such problems, Envoy may be the answer
However, Envoy is most prominent for its use as a service proxy for service meshes
The biggest service meshes today rely on Envoy, or have created their own variations of Envoy to use as a proxy
Envoy is an open-source network proxy used for cloud-native applications
It forms a transparent mesh of all communications across all applications in the environment
It also offers high performance with a small footprint edge and works as a service proxy
Digging deeper
Envoy is an official project with CNCF and has a vibrant contributor base
It is C++ distributed proxy, developed for L3/L4 network proxy and layer 7 edge
It is created for single applications and services, as well as large service mesh architectures
For large microservices, it supports communication bus and ‘universal data plane’
This is critical as Envoy separates the data plane and control plane in network traffic, enabling better separation of concerns
Key Features
Envoy’s high-performance server can operate with a small memory footprint
It offers advanced load-balancing capabilities, like circuit breaking, request shadowing, etc.
It is built on learnings of software and hardware load balancers like HAProxy/NGINX
It also supports wire-level monitoring of MongoDB, DynamoDB, and other services
It supports static configuration via the use of YAML files
For more advanced configuration, it has a set of gRPC-based APIs
If you're looking to simplify complex networking challenges in cloud-native, consider Envoy, or one of the service meshes based on it
To know more about Envoy and related topics, please visit www.TwainTaylor.com