GETTING EDGY VIDEO SERIES
Getting Edgy: What is Envoy Proxy?
Learn how Envoy Proxy is different from other popular Layer 7 proxies.
In today’s cloud native world, proxies are a popular topic. It’s more than likely that you’ve heard about Envoy Proxy, but what makes Envoy stand apart from other proxies? First, we need to understand how proxies have changed with changes in application architecture.
Before Cloud Architecture
Back in the day of monolithic applications, products such as NGINX and HAProxy were developed when architectural needs were different. At that time, you would deploy static proxies around a centralized deployment model and only serve L4 protocols (except for HTTP). Any monolithic applications using statically configured proxies were stuck behind one or a few single instances of an HAProxy, limiting them from dynamically changing.
Cloud Architecture Today
Today, a majority of applications are cloud native and use a microservices architecture in order to address the more dynamic nature of a microservices architecture, as opposed to the traditional applications that were mostly static. As you deploy more services, the configuration for your proxies changes frequently, so they have to be dynamically configured. In fact, it’s typical now to deploy a fleet of proxies that serve a decentralized deployment model.
Applications today require proxies that can route data through L7 protocols. In addition to HTTP, proxies need to route protocols such as Kafka, Redis, and gRPC. Applications also require a higher level of resilience because of their many different microservices, and observability semantics to ensure overall application availability or “uptime.”
Envoy for the Cloud
Envoy was made specifically for cloud architectures, and has pioneered many of the core features that cloud native apps depend upon today. Envoy supports hot restart to keep you from losing connection during a configuration change, and focuses on using the xDS API to manage your fleet of decentralized proxies, instead of using a single configuration file like you might with a centralized deployment model.
Envoy also supports a wide variety of protocols, such as gRPC, Kafka, and Redis, and has built-in functionality for observability and resilience. This allows you to collect metrics on your layer 7 traffic and enable different resilience strategies, such as circuit breaking, automatic retries, and timeouts.
Other Proxy Products
Because these robust features were developed with the initial launch of Envoy Proxy, similar products today now support comparable features.
However, as the pioneer of these features for L7 proxies, Envoy still maintains a highly “vendor neutral” status and is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, alongside Kubernetes.
Learn more
- Getting Started with Envoy Proxy for Microservices Resilience
- A Gentle Introduction to the Envoy Proxy and Load Balancing
- Envoy vs NGINX vs HAProxy: Why the open source Ambassador API Gateway chose Envoy
- Building Ambassador, an Open Source API Gateway on Kubernetes and Envoy
- Ambassador: Building a Control Plane for an Envoy-Powered API Gateway on Kubernetes
- Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Envoy Graduation
