Envoy is a high-performance edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications and distributed systems. It provides a consistent networking layer for routing traffic between applications, managing connections and observing service communication.
The software can be deployed as a sidecar alongside individual services, as a gateway at the network edge or as a central proxy for application traffic. This flexibility makes it particularly useful in microservice environments where networking requirements change frequently.
Envoy separates traffic processing from application logic, allowing administrators to configure routing, security and resilience policies without modifying individual services. Its extensible architecture includes support for HTTP response caching alongside a broad range of networking functionality.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Layer 3/4 proxying – handles TCP connections and network traffic through configurable listeners and filters.
- HTTP proxying – supports HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 traffic.
- Dynamic configuration – uses xDS APIs to update routing, clusters, listeners and other settings.
- Service discovery – maintains upstream endpoint information using static and dynamic discovery mechanisms.
- Load balancing – distributes traffic across upstream services using configurable algorithms.
- Traffic resilience – provides timeouts, retries, circuit breaking and outlier detection.
- HTTP response caching – uses cache filters to store eligible responses and reduce upstream requests.
- Configurable cache storage – supports in-memory and filesystem-backed HTTP cache implementations.
- Extensible filters – customises HTTP processing, authentication, routing and other traffic-handling behaviour.
- TLS termination – manages encrypted client and upstream connections.
- Rate limiting – supports local rate limiting and integration with external rate-limit services.
- Observability – exports statistics, access logs and distributed tracing information.
- Traffic mirroring – duplicates selected requests to additional upstream services for testing or analysis.
- Administrative interface – exposes operational information and management facilities.
Website: github.com/envoyproxy/envoy
Support:
Developer: Envoy Project Authors
License: Apache License 2.0
Envoy is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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