Technology · Ebook

Envoy: The Programmable Data Plane

by Shriira Press

Envoy is the high-performance proxy that powers modern service-to-service communication — the data plane behind most service meshes and many API gateways. This free book teaches it from the ground up: Envoy's threading and filter-chain architecture, the core configuration model (listeners, routes, clusters, endpoints), HTTP routing and the L7 filter chain with traffic splitting for canaries, load balancing and resilience (health checks, retries, timeouts, circuit breaking, outlier detection), observability with metrics/tracing/access logs, security with TLS and mutual TLS, dynamic configuration via the xDS protocol and control planes, how service meshes and gateways are built on Envoy, and operating it in production. Ten focused chapters with real config and clear diagrams that demystify the proxy quietly running underneath cloud-native networking.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — What Envoy Is
3. 3Chapter 2 — Architecture
4. 4Chapter 3 — Core Configuration Concepts
5. 5Chapter 4 — HTTP Routing and Filters
6. 6Chapter 5 — Load Balancing and Resilience
7. 7Chapter 6 — Observability
8. 8Chapter 7 — Security and TLS
9. 9Chapter 8 — xDS and Dynamic Configuration
10. 10Chapter 9 — Service Meshes and Gateways
11. 11Chapter 10 — Operating Envoy and Putting It Together