Overview
Envoy is a high-performance C++ distributed proxy. It is most commonly used as the 'data plane' for service meshes like Istio, where it runs as a sidecar alongside application containers to manage all network traffic.
Key Features
- L7 Proxy: Understands application-level protocols like HTTP, gRPC, and MongoDB.
- Advanced Load Balancing: Supports retries, circuit breaking, rate limiting, and zone-aware routing.
- Observability: Provides deep insights into network traffic with detailed metrics and tracing integration.
- Dynamic Configuration: Can be configured on the fly via a set of APIs (xDS), allowing for zero-downtime updates.
Origin
Originally developed at Lyft, Envoy is now a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).