Envoy
also: Envoy proxy
Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy designed to handle network traffic between services and external clients, commonly used in microservices architectures and as an API gateway.
Envoy is a layer 7 proxy and communication bus built for large modern service-oriented architectures. It acts as a mediator between clients and backend services, managing all inbound and outbound traffic with advanced routing, load balancing, and observability features.
Unlike traditional proxies, Envoy provides dynamic configuration, allowing services to adapt routing rules without restart. It handles protocol translation, connection pooling, circuit breaking, and rate limiting out of the box.
Example use case: In a microservices system, Envoy can sit between a client and multiple backend services, distributing traffic, retrying failed requests, and collecting detailed metrics—all transparently without modifying application code.
Envoy is often deployed as a sidecar proxy in containerized environments like Kubernetes, or as an API Gateway for external traffic ingestion.