What is Envoy?
Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
Envoy is a tool in the Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy category of a tech stack.
Envoy is an open source tool with 24.5K GitHub stars and 4.7K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Envoy's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Envoy?
Companies
76 companies reportedly use Envoy in their tech stacks, including Booking.com, StreamElements, and Avito.
Developers
214 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Envoy.
Envoy Integrations
Ambassador, AWS App Mesh, Twill, Google Traffic Director, and open-appsec are some of the popular tools that integrate with Envoy. Here's a list of all 5 tools that integrate with Envoy.
Pros of Envoy
9
Decisions about Envoy
Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Envoy in their tech stack.
Karkala Srikanth
We are looking to configure a load balancer with some admin UI. We are currently struggling to decide between NGINX, Traefik, HAProxy, and Envoy. We will use a load balancer in a containerized environment and the load balancer should flexible and easy to reload without changes in case containers are scaled up.
Blog Posts
Envoy Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Envoy?
Istio
Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
linkerd
linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.
Trailblazer
Trailblazer is a thin layer on top of Rails. It gently enforces encapsulation, an intuitive code structure and gives you an object-oriented architecture. In a nutshell: Trailblazer makes you write logicless models that purely act as data objects, don't contain callbacks, nested attributes, validations or domain logic. It removes bulky controllers and strong_parameters by supplying additional layers to hold that code and completely replaces helpers.
HAProxy
HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.