Cilium vs Envoy

Overview

Envoy

Stacks304

Followers546

Votes9

GitHub Stars27.0K

Forks5.1K

Cilium

Stacks38

Followers81

Votes1

GitHub Stars22.8K

Forks3.4K

Cilium vs Envoy: What are the differences?

Cilium and Envoy are both powerful networking technologies used in modern cloud-native environments. Here are some key differences between Cilium and Envoy:

Functionality and Scope: Cilium is a comprehensive networking and security solution designed for Kubernetes environments. It operates at the kernel level, providing fast and efficient packet-level networking and security features, such as load balancing, network policy enforcement, and encryption. On the other hand, Envoy is a high-performance proxy and edge load balancer that operates at the application layer. It is designed to handle complex network traffic management, including load balancing, traffic routing, and observability, making it suitable for a wide range of use cases beyond Kubernetes, such as service mesh architectures.
Deployment and Integration: Cilium is tightly integrated with Kubernetes and is often used as the networking and security solution within a Kubernetes cluster. It leverages Kubernetes' native capabilities for service discovery and network policy management. In contrast, Envoy is a standalone proxy that can be deployed as a sidecar alongside application containers or as an edge proxy in front of microservices. It can be integrated with various service mesh frameworks, such as Istio and Linkerd, as well as used as a standalone load balancer in non-Kubernetes environments.
Network Visibility and Observability: Cilium provides deep network visibility into Kubernetes applications, offering insights into network traffic, connections, and security policies. It supports fine-grained network policies based on application identity, labels, and Kubernetes namespaces. Cilium also offers observability features like service level observability (SLOs/SLIs) and integration with monitoring systems like Prometheus. In comparison, Envoy offers powerful observability capabilities through features like distributed tracing, request/response logging, and statistics aggregation. Its rich set of metrics and observability features make it well-suited for complex network debugging and performance optimization.
Performance and Efficiency: Cilium's eBPF-based approach allows it to achieve high-performance networking and security operations with minimal overhead on the kernel. It benefits from kernel-level optimizations and efficiently handles network traffic within the Kubernetes cluster. Envoy, being an application-level proxy, may introduce additional latency compared to kernel-based solutions like Cilium. However, Envoy is designed for high scalability and can efficiently handle a large number of connections and network requests.

In summary, Cilium is a Kubernetes-native networking and security solution, leveraging eBPF for fast packet-level operations within the kernel. It excels in providing network visibility and security features within Kubernetes clusters. On the other hand, Envoy is a versatile proxy and load balancer that operates at the application layer, offering rich observability and traffic management capabilities. It can be used in various deployment scenarios, including Kubernetes service meshes and non-Kubernetes environments.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Envoy	Cilium
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.	Open source software for providing and transparently securing network connectivity and loadbalancing between application workloads such as application containers or processes.
-	Identity Based Security - Cilium visibility and security policies are based on the container orchestrator identity (e.g., Kubernetes labels). Never again worry about network subnets or container IP addresses when writing security policies, auditing, or troubleshooting.; Blazing Performance - BPF is the underlying Linux superpower to do the heavy lifting on the datapath by providing sandboxed programmability of the Linux kernel with incredible performance.; API-Protocol Visibility + Security - Traditional firewalls only see and filter packets based on network headers like IP address and ports. Cilium can do this as well, but also understands and filters the individual HTTP, gRPC, and Kafka requests that stitch microservices together.; Designed for Scale - Cilium was designed for scale, with no node-to-node interactions required when new pods are deployed, and all coordination through a highly scalable key-value store.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 27.0K	GitHub Stars 22.8K
GitHub Forks 5.1K	GitHub Forks 3.4K
Stacks 304	Stacks 38
Followers 546	Followers 81
Votes 9	Votes 1
Pros & Cons
Pros 9 GRPC-Web	Pros 1 Sidecarless
Integrations
No integrations available	Kafka gRPC Istio Docker Kubernetes Apache Mesos

What are some alternatives to Envoy, Cilium?

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.

Let's Encrypt

It is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

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.

Sqreen

Sqreen is a security platform that helps engineering team protect their web applications, API and micro-services in real-time. The solution installs with a simple application library and doesn't require engineering resources to operate. Security anomalies triggered are reported with technical context to help engineers fix the code. Ops team can assess the impact of attacks and monitor suspicious user accounts involved.

Instant 2FA

Add a powerful, simple and flexible 2FA verification view to your login flow, without making any DB changes and just 3 API calls.

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

ORY Hydra

It is a self-managed server that secures access to your applications and APIs with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect. It is OpenID Connect Certified and optimized for latency, high throughput, and low resource consumption.

Virgil Security

Virgil consists of an open-source encryption library, which implements CMS and ECIES(including RSA schema), a Key Management API, and a cloud-based Key Management Service.

Clef

Clef is secure two-factor — built for consumers. Easy to use, integrate, and pay for.

Related Comparisons

Functionality and Scope: Cilium is a comprehensive networking and security solution designed for Kubernetes environments. It operates at the kernel level, providing fast and efficient packet-level networking and security features, such as load balancing, network policy enforcement, and encryption. On the other hand, Envoy is a high-performance proxy and edge load balancer that operates at the application layer. It is designed to handle complex network traffic management, including load balancing, traffic routing, and observability, making it suitable for a wide range of use cases beyond Kubernetes, such as service mesh architectures.
Deployment and Integration: Cilium is tightly integrated with Kubernetes and is often used as the networking and security solution within a Kubernetes cluster. It leverages Kubernetes' native capabilities for service discovery and network policy management. In contrast, Envoy is a standalone proxy that can be deployed as a sidecar alongside application containers or as an edge proxy in front of microservices. It can be integrated with various service mesh frameworks, such as Istio and Linkerd, as well as used as a standalone load balancer in non-Kubernetes environments.
Network Visibility and Observability: Cilium provides deep network visibility into Kubernetes applications, offering insights into network traffic, connections, and security policies. It supports fine-grained network policies based on application identity, labels, and Kubernetes namespaces. Cilium also offers observability features like service level observability (SLOs/SLIs) and integration with monitoring systems like Prometheus. In comparison, Envoy offers powerful observability capabilities through features like distributed tracing, request/response logging, and statistics aggregation. Its rich set of metrics and observability features make it well-suited for complex network debugging and performance optimization.
Performance and Efficiency: Cilium's eBPF-based approach allows it to achieve high-performance networking and security operations with minimal overhead on the kernel. It benefits from kernel-level optimizations and efficiently handles network traffic within the Kubernetes cluster. Envoy, being an application-level proxy, may introduce additional latency compared to kernel-based solutions like Cilium. However, Envoy is designed for high scalability and can efficiently handle a large number of connections and network requests.

Cilium vs Envoy