Envoy Proxy in 2019: Security, Caching, Wasm, HTTP/3, and more

Since its release in September 2016, Envoy Proxy has gained enormous traction in the market. Envoy was a classic case of the right product at the right time: Envoy had the right set of features and performance to address this need. Some of these features included a runtime API for configuration & management, dynamic configuration, gRPC & HTTP/2 support, automatic retries, traffic shadowing, and robust observability systems.

These factors created critical mass, driving rapid adoption. Envoy also quickly found a neutral home in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and, led by Lyft, quickly grew a vibrant developer community, with organizations such as AirBnb, Google, Lyft, Pinterest, Verizon, and others contributing. Envoy’s success has not gone unnoticed by the competition.

A year after Envoy’s announcement, HAProxy added a runtime API, hitless reloads, and HTTP/2 support in HAProxy 1.8, and, in June 2019, shipped HAProxy 2.0 with support for L7 retries, traffic shadowing, and gRPC.11 months after Envoy’s announcement, NGINX added a runtime API and shadowing in NGINX Plus R13, and in March 2018, added native support for gRPC in open source NGINX.

Source: getambassador.io