The high-performance proxy behind modern service meshes and gateways — routing, resilience, security, and observability.

Welcome to Envoy: The Programmable Data Plane.

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.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

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