Envoy Proxy
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Envoy is a high-performance proxy built by Lyft that became the backbone of modern service meshes. It sits next to your services, handling load balancing, retries, circuit breaking, and observability. Both Istio and AWS App Mesh use Envoy under the hood. It's the proxy that powers the proxy layer that powers your microservices. Very meta.
Real Talk
Envoy is a high-performance, C++-based L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large microservice architectures. Originally built at Lyft, it's a CNCF graduated project. It provides advanced load balancing, automatic retries, circuit breaking, rate limiting, observability (metrics, tracing, logging), and supports HTTP/2 and gRPC natively.
When You'll Hear This
"Envoy handles all our service-to-service communication." / "Istio uses Envoy as its data plane proxy — every pod gets a sidecar."
Related Terms
Istio
Istio is a service mesh that manages how microservices talk to each other.
Load Balancer
A load balancer is like a traffic cop for servers.
Nginx
Nginx (pronounced 'engine-x') is a super fast web server and reverse proxy that's been everywhere for 20 years.
Reverse Proxy
A reverse proxy sits in front of your servers and handles incoming traffic on their behalf.
Service Mesh
In a microservices system, every service needs to handle retries, timeouts, mutual TLS, and send traces. You could code all that in every service.