In this podcast we sit down with Matt Klein, software plumber at Lyft and creator of Envoy, and discuss topics including the continued evolution of the popular proxy, the strength of the open source Envoy community, and the value of creating and implementing standards throughout the technology stack. We also explore the larger topic of cloud natives platforms, and discuss the tradeoffs between using a simple and opinionated platform against something that is bespoke and more configurable, but also more complex. Related to this, Matt shares his thoughts on when and how to make the decision within an organisation to embrace technology like container orchestration and service meshes.

Finally, we explore the creation of the new Envoy Mobile project. The goal of this project is to expand the capabilities provided by Envoy all the way out to mobile devices powered by Android and iOS. For example, most current user-focused traffic shifting that is conducted at the edge is implemented with coarse-grained approaches via by BGP and DNS, and using something like Envoy within mobile app networking stacks should allow finer-grained control.

Why listen to this podcast:

- The Envoy Proxy community has grown from strength-to-strength over the last year, from the inaugural EnvoyCon that ran alongside KubeCon NA 2018, to the increasing number of code contributions from engineers working across the industry
 - Attempting to create a community-driven “universal proxy data plane” with clearly defined APIs, like Envoy’s XDS API, has allowed vendors to collaborate on a shared abstraction while still allowing room for “differentiated success” to be built on top of this standard
Google’s gRPC framework is adopting the Envoy XDS APIs, as this will allow both Envoy and gRPC instances to be operated via a single control plane, for example, Google Cloud Platform’s Traffic Director service.
 - There is a tendency within the software development industry to fetishise architectures that are designed and implemented by the unicorn tech companies, but not every organisation operates at this scale.
 - However, there has also been industry pushback against the complexity that modern platform components like container orchestration and service meshes can introduce to a technology stack.     - Using a platform within these components provides the best return on investment when an organisation’s software architecture and development teams have reached a certain size.
 - Function-as-a-Service (Faas)-type platforms will most likely be how engineers will interact with software in the future. Business-focused developers often do not want to interact with the platform plumbing
Envoy Mobile is building on prior art, and aims to expand the capabilities provided by Envoy all the way out to mobile devices using Android and iOS. Most current end user traffic shifting is implemented with coarse-grained approaches via BGP and DNS, and using something like Envoy instead will allow finer-grained control.
 - Using Envoy Mobile in combination with Protocol Buffers 3, which supports annotations on APIs, can facilitate working with APIs offline, configuring caching, and handling poor networking conditions. One of the motivations for this work is that small increases in application response times can lead to better business outcomes.

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InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Matt Klein on Envoy Mobile, Platform Complexity, and a Universal Data Plane API for Proxies

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