Envoy is a high-performance edge and service proxy built for cloud-native applications. It can act as an API gateway, service mesh data plane, load balancer, and traffic management layer. It is widely used in Kubernetes environments and supports advanced routing, observability, and protocol features.
Free and open source under Apache 2.0. No license fees; you pay for infrastructure, load-balancer capacity, observability, and optional commercial support or managed distributions such as Gloo Edge, Emissary, Tetrate, or Envoy Gateway.
Open Source
Envoy is a strong choice for teams building cloud-native, microservice, or Kubernetes-based architectures that need reliable traffic management and observability. Its performance and extensibility are major strengths, but the configuration complexity can create a steep learning curve. It is best suited for platform teams, SREs, and enterprises that want fine-grained control over proxy behavior.
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