Envoy vs NGINX Service-Mesh comparison

As on the ground microservice practitioners quickly realize, the majority of operational problems that arise when moving to a distributed architecture are ultimately grounded in two areas: networking and observability. It is simply an orders of magnitude larger problem to network and debug a set of intertwined distributed services versus a single monolithic application.

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. Built on the learnings of solutions such as NGINX, HAProxy, hardware load balancers, and cloud load balancers, Envoy runs alongside every application and abstracts the network by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner. When all service traffic in an infrastructure flows via an Envoy mesh, it becomes easy to visualize problem areas via consistent observability, tune overall performance, and add substrate features in a single place.

Designed to be lightweight and seamless, NGINX Service Mesh scales from open source projects to a fully supported, secure, and scalable enterprise class solution that enables users to take control of Kubernetes with a turnkey, secure, service-to-service solution featuring a unified data plane for ingress and egress management in a single configuration.

NGINX Service Mesh provides the seamless and transparent load balancing, reverse proxy, traffic routing, identity, and encryption features needed for production-grade service mesh deployments. When paired with the NGINX Plus-based version of NGINX Ingress Controller, it provides a unified data plane that can be managed with a single configuration.