Inside Envoy: The Proxy for the Future
A documentary about the creation of Envoy - an L7 proxy, which became the basis for the service mesh and modern microservice infrastructure.
Source
Telegram: book_cube
Original recommendation for the Envoy Proxy documentary.
What is the film about?
The documentary tells the story of creation Envoy Proxy - a high-performance L4/L7 proxy developed by Lyft to solve the problems of microservice architecture. The film shows the path from an internal tool to a CNCF graduate project, which became the basis for Istio, Ambassador and other service mesh solutions.
Practice
API Gateway - case
Designing an API Gateway using patterns implemented in Envoy.
Key themes of the film
Lyft problems
Lyft faced the typical challenges of growing a microservice architecture: the complexity of debugging distributed requests, the lack of a single observability, a heterogeneous technology stack (Python, Go, Java) without a unified network infrastructure.
Matt Klein and team
Matt Klein is the creator of Envoy, who in 2016 began designing a next-generation proxy server. His vision: the network layer should be transparent to applications, and all routing and observability problems should be solved at the infrastructure level.
Architectural solutions
Envoy was originally designed as sidecar proxy: Each service gets its own Envoy instance, which intercepts all incoming and outgoing traffic. This allows you to add observability, retry logic, circuit breaking without changing application code.
Open Source and CNCF
In September 2016, Envoy was published as an open source project. In 2017 he joined the CNCF, and in 2018 he received the status graduated project - one of the first after Kubernetes and Prometheus.
Envoy technical features
L7 Protocols
- HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3
- gRPC with balancing
- MongoDB, Redis, MySQL
- WebSocket support
Observability
- Distributed tracing
- Prometheus metrics
- Access logging
- Health checking
Traffic Management
- Load balancing
- Circuit breaking
- Rate limiting
- Retries & timeouts
xDS API — Discovery Services
One of Envoy's key innovations is its family xDS API for dynamic configuration. Instead of static configs, Envoy receives settings from the control plane in real time:
Related film
Kubernetes: The Documentary
The history of the creation of the orchestrator on which Envoy is most often launched.
Ecosystem around Envoy
Service mesh from Google/IBM/Lyft, uses Envoy as data plane
API Gateway for Kubernetes built on Envoy
Ingress controller from VMware based on Envoy
API Gateway and Ingress controller from Solo.io
Key Findings
- •Sidecar pattern — a proxy next to each service solves the problem of a heterogeneous stack
- •xDS API - dynamic configuration via control plane instead of static files
- •Observability first — distributed tracing and metrics built in from day one
- •Open Source matters — the transition to CNCF accelerated the adoption and development of the ecosystem