AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Envoy: What are the differences?

Developers describe AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) as "Automatically distribute your incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances". With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task. On the other hand, Envoy is detailed as "C++ front/service proxy". 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.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Envoy can be categorized as "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" tools.

Envoy is an open source tool with 10.2K GitHub stars and 1.58K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Envoy's open source repository on GitHub.

Coursera, 9GAG, and Quora are some of the popular companies that use AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), whereas Envoy is used by VSCO, Handshake, and CommonBond. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) has a broader approval, being mentioned in 723 company stacks & 314 developers stacks; compared to Envoy, which is listed in 18 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.