Envoy Proxy

An open-source, high-performance L7 proxy developed by Lyft and donated to the CNCF, designed as the data plane of service mesh architectures. Envoy supports HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and gRPC, with built-in features for automatic retries, circuit breaking, rate limiting, load balancing, distributed tracing (Zipkin/Jaeger/OpenTelemetry), and detailed observability via its statistics subsystem. Envoy's dynamic configuration via the xDS discovery API (LDS, RDS, CDS, EDS) allows control planes such as Istio, Consul, and AWS App Mesh to reconfigure proxies without restarts. It is the most common sidecar proxy in Kubernetes service meshes.