Envoy Proxy: Open Source Edge and Service Proxy
Cloud-native edge and service proxy with load balancing, observability, runtime configuration, and authentication features for high performance and resiliency.
What is Envoy Proxy?
Envoy Proxy is an open source, distributed proxy designed for cloud-native applications. It provides the following key features:
- Layer 7 load balancing - Envoy can route HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, and other Layer 7 traffic across multiple servers
- Service discovery - Automatically detects and tracks application services to route traffic
- Observability - Supports distributed tracing, health checking, statistics, and logging
- Resiliency - Retries, circuit breaking, global rate limiting help make applications resilient
- Security - Provides authentication, TLS termination, and role-based access control
- Runtime configuration - Envoy configuration can be dynamically updated without restarting the proxy
Some key benefits of Envoy Proxy include:
- Platform agnostic - Can run on Kubernetes, virtual machines, bare metal, etc
- High performance - Optimized for modern hardware with asynchronous and parallelized architecture
- Modularity - Many components are pluggable for custom use cases
- Portable - Ships as a self-contained binary with no external dependencies
Envoy is well-suited for microservice, cloud-native, and container-based architectures where network traffic needs to be intelligently routed and applications require resiliency.