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Envoy

Stacks194

Followers362

+ 1

Votes7

Istio

Stacks543

Followers967

+ 1

Votes41

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Envoy vs Istio: What are the differences?

Developers describe Envoy as "C++ front/service proxy". Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. On the other hand, Istio is detailed as "Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices, by Google, IBM, and Lyft". Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Envoy can be classified as a tool in the "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" category, while Istio is grouped under "Microservices Tools".

Envoy and Istio are both open source tools. It seems that Istio with 18.5K GitHub stars and 3.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Envoy with 10.2K GitHub stars and 1.58K GitHub forks.

Cuemby, Entelo, and AgFlow are some of the popular companies that use Istio, whereas Envoy is used by Handshake, VSCO, and CommonBond. Istio has a broader approval, being mentioned in 32 company stacks & 30 developers stacks; compared to Envoy, which is listed in 18 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.

Decisions about Envoy and Istio

Prateek Mittal

Chose

Istio

over

Traefik

Kong

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

Pros of Envoy

Pros of Istio

7
GRPC-Web

10
Zero code for logging and monitoring
8
Service Mesh
7
Great flexibility
4
Ingress controller
3
Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker
3
Powerful authorization mechanisms
3
Resiliency
3
Full Security

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Cons of Envoy

Cons of Istio

Be the first to leave a con

7
Performance

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What is Envoy?

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.

What is Istio?

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

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What companies use Envoy?

What companies use Istio?

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What tools integrate with Envoy?

What tools integrate with Istio?

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Blog Posts

Simplifying Web Deploys

May 6 2020 at 6:34AM

1804

What are some alternatives to Envoy and Istio?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

linkerd

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

Trailblazer

Trailblazer is a thin layer on top of Rails. It gently enforces encapsulation, an intuitive code structure and gives you an object-oriented architecture. In a nutshell: Trailblazer makes you write logicless models that purely act as data objects, don't contain callbacks, nested attributes, validations or domain logic. It removes bulky controllers and strong_parameters by supplying additional layers to hold that code and completely replaces helpers.

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

See all alternatives

Interest over time

News about Envoy

More news

News about Istio

[Podcast] PodCTL #23 – Microservices with Istio

(blog.openshift.com)

Jan 29, 2018

nginMesh: NGINX as a Proxy in an Istio Service Mesh

(www.nginx.com)

Dec 7, 2017

Request Routing and Policy Management with the Istio Service Mesh