Envoy Proxy

advanced

Modern edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications.

Overview

Envoy Proxy is a high-performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and universal data plane for large microservice service mesh architectures. Originally built at Lyft to handle their massive scale requirements, Envoy has become the foundation for numerous service mesh implementations including Istio, Ambassador, and Gloo. It excels at L3/L4 filtering, HTTP L7 filtering, HTTP/2 first design, and gRPC proxying while providing advanced load balancing, health checking, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and observability features. This Envoy deployment creates a powerful edge proxy capable of handling ingress traffic, performing advanced routing decisions, and providing comprehensive observability through its built-in admin interface. The configuration mounts a custom envoy.yaml file that defines listeners for HTTP/HTTPS traffic on ports 80 and 443, while exposing the administrative interface on port 9901 for real-time monitoring and configuration inspection. Envoy's hot reload capability allows configuration changes without dropping connections, making it ideal for production environments requiring zero-downtime updates. This setup is perfect for platform engineers implementing cloud-native architectures, DevOps teams managing microservice communications, and organizations requiring enterprise-grade traffic management with detailed observability. Envoy's extensive filter ecosystem and xDS API compatibility make it an excellent choice for teams building service meshes or needing advanced proxy features like mutual TLS, JWT validation, rate limiting, and sophisticated routing based on headers, paths, or weighted distributions.

Key Features

Advanced HTTP/2 and gRPC proxying with connection multiplexing and flow control
Built-in circuit breaker with configurable failure thresholds and automatic recovery
Comprehensive health checking with active and passive failure detection
Real-time metrics and tracing integration with Prometheus, Jaeger, and Zipkin
Hot configuration reload via SIGHUP signal without dropping existing connections
Sophisticated load balancing algorithms including consistent hashing and zone-aware routing
Web Assembly (WASM) filter support for custom request/response processing
Automatic retry logic with exponential backoff and jitter configuration

Common Use Cases

1API gateway for microservices requiring advanced routing and traffic splitting
2Edge proxy for Kubernetes clusters handling ingress traffic and SSL termination
3Service mesh data plane component for inter-service communication
4Load balancer replacement requiring health checking and circuit breaking
5gRPC proxy for handling protocol translation and connection pooling
6Rate limiting proxy for protecting backend services from traffic spikes
7Observability gateway collecting metrics and traces from distributed systems

Prerequisites

Docker Engine 20.10+ and Docker Compose V2 for container orchestration
Minimum 512MB RAM allocation for Envoy proxy operations and connection handling
Valid envoy.yaml configuration file with listeners, clusters, and route definitions
Available ports 80, 443, and 9901 for HTTP, HTTPS, and admin interface access
Understanding of Envoy configuration concepts including listeners, filters, and clusters
SSL certificates if configuring HTTPS termination in the Envoy configuration

For development & testing. Review security settings, change default credentials, and test thoroughly before production use. See Terms

docker-compose.yml

1services: 
2  envoy: 
3    image: envoyproxy/envoy:v1.28-latest
4    container_name: envoy
5    restart: unless-stopped
6    volumes: 
7      - ./envoy/envoy.yaml:/etc/envoy/envoy.yaml:ro
8    ports: 
9      - "80:80"
10      - "443:443"
11      - "9901:9901"
12    networks: 
13      - envoy-network
14
15networks: 
16  envoy-network: 
17    driver: bridge

.env Template

.env

1# Envoy admin interface
2ENVOY_ADMIN_PORT=9901

Usage Notes

1Docs: https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/
2Admin interface at http://localhost:9901 - stats, config dump, health
3Create envoy/envoy.yaml with listeners, clusters, and routes
4Hot reload config: kill -SIGHUP $(pidof envoy)
5Built-in circuit breaking, retries, and outlier detection
6Use xDS for dynamic configuration in service mesh setups

Quick Start

terminal

1# 1. Create the compose file
2cat > docker-compose.yml << 'EOF'
3services:
4  envoy:
5    image: envoyproxy/envoy:v1.28-latest
6    container_name: envoy
7    restart: unless-stopped
8    volumes:
9      - ./envoy/envoy.yaml:/etc/envoy/envoy.yaml:ro
10    ports:
11      - "80:80"
12      - "443:443"
13      - "9901:9901"
14    networks:
15      - envoy-network
16
17networks:
18  envoy-network:
19    driver: bridge
20EOF
21
22# 2. Create the .env file
23cat > .env << 'EOF'
24# Envoy admin interface
25ENVOY_ADMIN_PORT=9901
26EOF
27
28# 3. Start the services
29docker compose up -d
30
31# 4. View logs
32docker compose logs -f

One-Liner

Run this command to download and set up the recipe in one step:

terminal

1curl -fsSL https://docker.recipes/api/recipes/envoy-proxy/run | bash

Troubleshooting

Config validation failed: Check envoy.yaml syntax using 'envoy --mode validate --config-path envoy.yaml'
Admin interface returns 404: Verify admin listener is configured in envoy.yaml with correct address binding
Upstream cluster connection failures: Ensure cluster endpoints are reachable and health checks are properly configured
High memory usage during traffic spikes: Adjust connection buffer limits and enable HTTP/2 connection reuse
SSL handshake failures: Verify certificate chain completeness and TLS version compatibility in listener configuration
Hot reload not working: Ensure Envoy process has proper signal handling enabled and configuration file permissions are correct

Community Notes

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