Introduction
Envoy is a modern, high-performance L7 proxy designed to address the challenges of dynamic service discovery, load balancing, observability, and resilience in distributed systems.
Originally developed by Lyft and now a graduated CNCF project, Envoy Proxy operates as both an edge proxy (handling ingress traffic) and a service proxy (facilitating internal service-to-service communication). Its robust feature set, extensibility, and active ecosystem make it a foundational component in modern service meshes and cloud-native architectures—including Cake’s own service topology.
Envoy is deeply integrated into Cake’s Kubernetes infrastructure to enable:
Dynamic Service Discovery and Load Balancing: Automatically discovers backend services via control plane integrations (e.g., xDS or Kubernetes APIs), with intelligent routing and connection pooling.
Advanced L7 Routing and Resilience Features: Supports retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, rate limiting, and fault injection to improve system stability and user experience.
Transparent Observability: Emits rich telemetry including metrics, logs, and distributed traces, providing deep visibility into service behavior and traffic patterns.
Security and Policy Enforcement: Offers built-in support for TLS termination, mTLS between services, and role-based routing and access control.
Extensibility at Scale: Configurable via APIs, with support for WASM filters and dynamic configuration updates to evolve with application needs without restarts.
Envoy serves as the backbone for inter-service communication, API gateway functionality, and zero-trust security enforcement across environments. Its ability to scale with demand and adapt to evolving topology makes it essential for maintaining both performance and security.