Envoy is a high-performance, open-source edge and service proxy originally built at Lyft and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it graduated in 2018. Written in C++, Envoy was designed from the ground up for modern microservices architectures and service mesh deployments.
Envoy operates as a sidecar proxy that runs alongside every service instance, handling all network traffic in and out. It provides advanced load balancing, automatic retries, circuit breaking, rate limiting, and detailed observability through metrics, logging, and distributed tracing. Its xDS API allows for dynamic, real-time configuration without restarts.
Envoy has become the data plane of choice for most service mesh implementations, including Istio, Consul Connect, and AWS App Mesh. Its extensibility through WebAssembly filters lets developers add custom logic without modifying Envoy’s core code.
While Envoy isn’t backed by a single commercial entity, several companies offer commercial Envoy distributions and support, including Tetrate and Solo.io. The project has a vibrant open-source community and is maintained by contributors from Google, Lyft, Microsoft, and many other organizations.
