Introducing WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio.

Since adopting Envoy in 2016, the Istio project has always wanted to provide a platform on top of which a rich set of extensions could be built, to meet the diverse needs of our users. There are many reasons to add capability to the data plane of a service mesh — to support newer protocols, integrate with proprietary security controls, or enhance observability with custom metrics, to name a few. Over the last year and a half our team here at Google has been working on adding dynamic extensibility to the Envoy proxy using WebAssembly.

We are delighted to share that work with the world today, as well as unveiling WebAssembly (Wasm) for Proxies (Proxy-Wasm): an ABI, which we intend to standardize; SDKs; and its first major implementation, the new, lower-latency Istio telemetry system.

Source: istio.io