Install envoy with Homebrew, Nix, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• envoy

Project history

Matt Klein described Envoy as beginning inside Lyft in May 2015 after the company found that existing open source options did not fit its microservice networking and observability needs. The first MVP was deployed in September 2015, initially as Lyft's edge proxy, and it later expanded into sidecar service-to-service proxying.

Lyft announced Envoy publicly on September 14, 2016, then donated it to CNCF in September 2017 as CNCF's eleventh hosted project. CNCF announced Envoy's graduation on November 28, 2018, citing neutral governance, multi-organization committership, adoption, and community sustainability.

Adoption history

By early summer 2016, Lyft was using Envoy for all edge and service-to-service networking across more than one hundred services and millions of requests per second. That production pedigree made Envoy unusually credible for teams trying to move from monoliths to microservices.

CNCF's graduation announcement named large-scale users and contributors including Airbnb, Booking.com, eBay, F5, Google, IBM, Lyft, Medium, Microsoft, Netflix, Pinterest, Salesforce, Square, Stripe, Tencent, Twilio, Verizon, and VSCO. It also framed Envoy as an enterprise-ready project with hundreds of contributors and thousands of commits by late 2018.

Envoy's adoption grew alongside service mesh and cloud-native gateway products. CNCF and the Envoy README describe it as a CNCF-hosted project with official documentation, release process, security policy, public user and developer lists, and related repositories for APIs, examples, and performance testing.

How it is used

Envoy runs out of process, so it can sit next to applications written in any language or runtime. Its documented feature set includes HTTP/2, gRPC, load balancing, retries, timeouts, circuit breaking, rate limiting, stats, logging, tracing, external authorization, and a rich configuration API.

Common package-level use cases are starting a local Envoy binary with an explicit configuration file, validating proxy behavior in development, running it as a sidecar in service mesh deployments, or using it as an edge or middle proxy in front of applications.

Why package nerds care

Envoy matters to package nerds because it is a large, fast-moving, C++ infrastructure binary whose Homebrew formula gives developers a direct way to install and test the same proxy that underpins many Kubernetes and service-mesh stacks.

It is also a canonical example of a package where the command-line executable is only the visible tip of a broader ecosystem: APIs, generated configuration, xDS control planes, security releases, service meshes, and gateway products all orbit the `envoy` binary.

Timeline

• 2015-05: Envoy development began at Lyft.
• 2015-09: MVP deployed at Lyft, initially as an edge proxy.
• 2016-06: Fully deployed at Lyft for edge and service-to-service networking.
• 2016-09-14: Lyft publicly announced Envoy.
• 2017-09: Envoy joined CNCF as its eleventh hosted project.
• 2018-11-28: CNCF announced Envoy graduation.

Related projects

• Envoy is closely related to Kubernetes-era service mesh and gateway systems, including Istio and Ambassador/API gateway products that use Envoy as a data plane.
• The Envoy project also maintains related repositories and assets for API definitions, performance testing, and filter examples.

Sources

• https://www.envoyproxy.io/
• https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy
• https://eng.lyft.com/envoy-joins-the-cncf-dc18baefbc22
• https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2018/11/28/cncf-announces-envoy-graduation/