Using Envoy Proxy to Improve Reliability, Security, and Observability of Microservices

How to get started with Envoy in your stack

Tanmay Deshpande
Better Programming
Published in
6 min readOct 28, 2020

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Envoy Proxy logo
Image credit: https://www.envoyproxy.io

Envoy is an open-source proxy created at Lyft. As the world is moving towards a distributed microservice architecture, practitioners are observing difficulties in running operations in two main areas:

  • Networking
  • Observability

Envoy tries to solve these problems by making networks more transparent to applications. It also provides a way to better collect stats so that it’s easier to debug and trace the issues.

The most common way the Envoy proxy is deployed today is alongside applications as a sidecar. Just in case you are not aware of a sidecar pattern, then you can read about it in my previous article.

In this article, I am going to talk about how to get started with Envoy Proxy with a DIY tutorial and how to use Envoy’s various features to improve the reliability, security, and observability of your applications.

Introduction to Envoy

Envoy is a self-contained process. When a remote client calls an Envoy proxy, the request goes through various Envoy modules. Let’s try to understand these.

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