L7 Proxies - bobbae/gcp GitHub Wiki

In a microservice architecture, services communicate with each other through Layer 7 protocols such as gRPC and HTTP. Since the network is not reliable (and services can go down!), managing L7 communications is critical for reliability and scale.

L7 Proxies and API Gateways

• Traefik
• NGINX
• HAProxy
• Envoy
• Ambassador

Envoy

Envoy pioneered the use of dynamic APIs for management, and an ecosystem of additional open source projects that use Envoy has evolved. These projects generally function as so-called control planes to manage Envoy. Projects that use Envoy proxy include Consul Connect, Istio, and Ambassador.

https://www.envoyproxy.io/

Sidecar Proxy

https://blog.envoyproxy.io/introduction-to-modern-network-load-balancing-and-proxying-a57f6ff80236 https://linkerd.io

Service Mesh

A Service Mesh is a transparent layer that adds resilience, observability, and security to your service-to-service communication. Example service meshes include Istio and Linkerd. Istio is closely associated with Envoy because Istio relies on Envoy to do the actual Layer 7 traffic management. Istio itself is a control plane for a fleet of Envoy Proxies that are deployed next to your microservices.