On today’s podcast, Wes Reisz talks to Matt Klein about Envoy. Envoy is a modern, high performance, small footprint edge and service proxy. While it was originally developed at Lyft (and still drives much of their architecture), it is a fully open source driven project. Matt addresses on this podcast what he sees as the major design goals of Envoy, answers questions about a sidecar performance impact, discusses observability, and thinks out loud on the future of Envoy.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Envoy’s goal is to abstract the network from application programmers. It’s really about helping application developers focus on building business logic and not on the application plumbing.

- Envoy is a large community driven project, not a cohesive product that does one thing. It can be used as a foundational building blocks to extend into a variety of use cases, including as an edge proxy, as a service mesh sidecar, and as a substrate for building new products.

- While there is performance cost for using sidecar proxies, the rich featureset is often a worthwhile tradeoff. With that said, there is work being done that is greatly improving Envoy’s performance.

- Envoy is built to run Lyft. There were no features that were in Envoy when it was open sourced that were not used at Lyft.

- Envoy emits a rich set of logs and has a plugable tracing system. The goal is observability first and one of the main project goals.

- Lyft deploys Envoy master twice per week.

- Envoy’s roadmap includes work on automating settings (rate limits and retries), focus on ease of operation (such as where things got routed what the internal timings), and additional protocol support such as Kafka.

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