Envoy

Envoy is used by 0.09% of sites

Official Website

https://www.envoyproxy.io/

Category

Reverse proxies
envoy.webp
Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy that provides a modular, high-performance, and cloud-native communication layer for distributed systems. It was developed by Lyft and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Envoy is designed to handle modern networking challenges and is often used in microservices architectures and cloud-native environments.

Here are some key features and characteristics of Envoy:

Service Proxy: Envoy acts as a service proxy, sitting between client applications and backend services. It manages the network communication between these components, handling tasks such as load balancing, service discovery, health checking, and traffic routing.

High Performance: Envoy is built with performance in mind. It is designed to handle high traffic volumes, offering low latency and high throughput. Envoy achieves this by using an event-driven architecture and leveraging modern networking technologies like non-blocking I/O and multiplexing.

Service Mesh Support: Envoy is often used as a data plane in service mesh architectures, where it helps with service-to-service communication and provides observability, security, and control features. It integrates with service mesh frameworks like Istio, enabling advanced traffic management, security policies, and telemetry capabilities.

Load Balancing: Envoy supports various load balancing algorithms and can distribute traffic intelligently across backend services. It can handle different load balancing strategies like round-robin, least connections, and consistent hashing, helping to optimize resource utilization and improve system scalability.

Dynamic Configuration: Envoy supports dynamic configuration updates, allowing it to adapt to changes in the system without requiring a restart or downtime. It can receive configuration updates from centralized management systems, service discovery mechanisms, or APIs, enabling flexible and agile configuration management.

Observability and Tracing: Envoy provides built-in observability features, including logging, metrics, and distributed tracing. It generates detailed logs and metrics about network traffic, allowing operators to monitor and troubleshoot issues effectively. It also integrates with tracing systems like Jaeger and Zipkin to provide end-to-end request tracing across services.

Extensibility: Envoy offers a rich set of extension points that allow developers to customize its behavior and add new features. It supports filters and plugins for traffic manipulation, authentication, authorization, and advanced networking capabilities. This extensibility makes Envoy highly adaptable to different use cases and integration scenarios.

Envoy has gained popularity in the cloud-native ecosystem due to its performance, scalability, and flexibility. It provides a robust infrastructure layer for managing network traffic and communication within distributed systems, making it well-suited for modern microservices architectures and service mesh deployments.