Hello! Blog post writer here. Happy to answer any questions.
Are you using envoy at all in your main http ingress path? You mentioned haproxy and AWS ELBs, but it wasn't clear if envoy is also being considered for public ingress traffic.
Keep up the great work!
Our HAProxy layer that routes ingress traffic to the core backend infrastructure has considerable routing logic that can be moved to Envoy and then further extended. We'd love to explore that path in the coming months.
Quite a bit of complex routing and dynamic configurations can be provided by map files [2] and these and many other settings can be updated directly from the Runtime API [3].
With that said -- we are actively working to make things even better and intend to introduce support for updating SSL certificates/keys directly through the Runtime API as well as introducing a Data Plane API for HAProxy.
We have a new release coming any day now and this will lay the foundation that will allow us to continue to provide best-in-class performance while accelerating cutting edge feature delivery.
[1] https://www.haproxy.com/blog/hitless-reloads-with-haproxy-ho... [2] https://www.haproxy.com/blog/introduction-to-haproxy-maps/ [3] https://www.haproxy.com/blog/dynamic-configuration-haproxy-r...
I'm really excited about what we're building out for next year and can't wait to share as well. Feel free to reach out on reddit (u/wangofchung) or directly at courtney.wang@reddit.com for more in-depth discussion!
1. Have you considered/are considering ISTIO control plane for your Envoy fleet? Why or why not?
2. Did you containerize your applications before using Envoy? The blog post talks about running them on autoscaled ec2 instances but its not clear if you're running application binaries on those vms or serving from containers
2. We have not containerized prior to Envoy. We're running application binaries provisioned with Puppet on EC2 for most of our infrastructure still.
In the period you had parts of your system with envoy and parts without, have your routed the outbound traffic from envoy-equiped services through their local proxy before reaching its envoy-less destination? Or did you omit envoy then?
Others have mentioned that there are some gotchas with Envoy, and you mention a few about the migration bumps. Did you encounter other gotchas? And do you have any suggestions on how to avoid/mitigate their impact?
Aside from what what discussed, there weren't many things with Envoy specifically. We did have a few minor issues with the Thrift tooling, e.g.
https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/commit/a3c744294bca2cbf6...
but as the above indicates, they were resolved _very_ quickly.
The most important thing when making a transition like this is to have as much monitoring and observability as possible without the new tech. We were able to quickly identify and respond to issues we had with Envoy based on existing application and system instrumentation that weren't directly provided by Envoy, along with the vigilance of our engineering team.
Have you been thinking about adopting istio? If yes, why didn't you?
We didn't do so immediately because we did not want to immediately update all of our technology at once and felt that a piece-wise migration would be both the least disruptive to our infrastructure and safest. I think of Istio as like Smartstack in that it's not actually a complete "thing" so much as a suite of technologies that can be individually evaluated and deployed. It's very easy to fall into the trap of wanting to do everything at once, and we opted to make small progressive steps for this initiative.