Envoy Cloud-Native Proxy

A Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project originally built at Lyft, currently at version 1.38.3 with the Apache 2.0 license, providing a high-performance C++ distributed proxy designed for cloud-native applications. As Peter Morelli, VP Engineering at Lyft, stated, the organization made tremendous strides in resilience and observability since deploying the proxy across its microservices architecture. Used by over 30 major technology companies including Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Booking.com, Databricks, Dropbox, eBay, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Pinterest, Reddit, Salesforce, Snapchat, Stripe, Square, Tencent, Twilio, Uber, Verizon, VMware, Wise, Yahoo Japan, and Yelp. Core features include an out-of-process architecture where the proxy runs as a self-contained high-performance server with a small memory footprint alongside any application language or framework, first-class HTTP/2 and gRPC support for both incoming and outgoing connections with transparent HTTP/1.1-to-HTTP/2 proxying, advanced load balancing with automatic retries, circuit breaking, global rate limiting, request shadowing, and zone-local routing, robust dynamic configuration APIs for runtime traffic management without restarts, and deep L7 observability with native distributed tracing, statistical output, and wire-level visibility for protocols including MongoDB and DynamoDB. The xDS API specification enables external control planes to dynamically configure listeners, routes, clusters, and endpoints, forming the foundation for service mesh implementations including Istio and Consul Connect.