What is Envoy?
Envoy is an open source service mesh created by Lyft that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, observe and manage microservices. As a service mesh, Envoy creates a dedicated infrastructure layer to handle service-to-service communication through a proxy. Key features of Envoy include:
- Load balancing - Envoy can distribute traffic across multiple services and balance requests.
- Service discovery - Automatically discover services and route traffic.
- Circuit breaking - Protect downstream services by stopping cascade failures.
- Global rate limiting - Enforce limits on requests to protect from spikes in traffic.
- Observability - Get detailed statistics, logs and traces to monitor services.
- Security - Apply ACLs, enforce authentication, authorization and encryption between services.
Envoy runs alongside every service and acts as a communication bus for them. By abstracting the underlying network, Envoy provides consistency, reliability and portability across different platforms and languages for microservices. It's used by companies like Airbnb, Pinterest and Uber to connect their services.