Envoy Vs Nginx and How to install Envoy and Nginx.

Top 10 Highlighted points about Envoy proxy

1. Envoy is an open-source, high-performance, service proxy and communication bus.
2. Designed for microservices architecture to provide traffic management, observability, and security.
3. Supports various protocols such as HTTP, gRPC, TCP, and more.
4. Dynamic service discovery and configuration management.
5. Can be used as a sidecar proxy, ingress proxy, or service mesh.
6. Supports advanced traffic routing rules and resiliency features such as circuit breaking and fault injection.
7. Integrates with service meshes such as Istio and Consul Connect.
8. Provides detailed observability through metrics, tracing, and logging.
9. Can be extended through filters for custom processing logic.
10. Adopted by major companies and widely used in production environments.

Difference between Envoy and Nginx

1. Purpose: Envoy is a service proxy designed for microservices architecture while Nginx is a web server and reverse proxy.
2. Protocols: Envoy supports a wide range of protocols while Nginx primarily supports HTTP and HTTPS.
3. Load balancing: Envoy has more advanced load balancing options compared to Nginx.
4. Configuration: Envoy has a dynamic configuration model while Nginx uses a file-based configuration.
5. Observability: Envoy provides more comprehensive observability features such as distributed tracing and metrics.
6. Service Mesh: Envoy is often used as a core component in service mesh architectures, Nginx doesn’t have this capability.
7. Scalability: Envoy is designed to be horizontally scalable, Nginx can handle high loads but does not have native scaling features.
8. Extensibility: Envoy can be extended through filters for custom processing logic, Nginx doesn’t have this feature.
9. Performance: Both Envoy and Nginx have high performance, but Envoy’s performance may be impacted by its added features.
10. Use cases: Envoy is suitable for microservices architecture and service mesh while Nginx is suitable for web server and reverse proxy use cases.

Installing envoy Proxy

1. Binary distribution: You can download the pre-compiled binary for your operating system from the Envoy website.
2. Docker: Envoy provides official Docker images, which can be pulled from the Docker Hub.
3. Package manager: Envoy is available in some package managers such as Homebrew (macOS) and apt (Debian/Ubuntu).

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install envoy

Once installed, you can start Envoy by running the envoy command in your terminal. Before using Envoy, you will need to configure it by creating a configuration file. The configuration file specifies how Envoy should behave and how it should route traffic.

How to start Envoy

envoy -c envoy.yaml

envoy — help

Basic Envoy.yaml file

In this example, Envoy is configured to listen on 0.0.0.0 on port 80 and act as an HTTP reverse proxy. Requests are routed to a single service cluster named service_cluster running on 127.0.0.1 on port 8000. This is a very basic example and can be customized based on your requirements.

admin:
access_log_path: /tmp/admin_access.log
address:
socket_address:
address: 0.0.0.0
port_value: 9901
static_resources:
listeners:
— name: listener_0
address:
socket_address:
address: 0.0.0.0
port_value: 80
filter_chains:
— filters:
— name: envoy.http_connection_manager
config:
stat_prefix: ingress_http
codec_type: AUTO
route_config:
virtual_hosts:
— name: local_service
domains: [“*”]
routes:
— match:
prefix: “/”
route:
cluster: service_cluster
http_filters:
— name: envoy.router
clusters:
— name: service_cluster
connect_timeout: 0.25s
type: STRICT_DNS
lb_policy: ROUND_ROBIN
load_assignment:
cluster_name: service_cluster
endpoints:
— lb_endpoints:
— endpoint:
address:
socket_address:
address: 127.0.0.1
port_value: 8000

Installing Nginx Proxy

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nginx

How to start Nginx

sudo service nginx start

sudo service nginx status

Example nginx.conf

In this example, Nginx is configured to listen on port 80 and serve files from the /usr/share/nginx/html directory. Requests to example.com will be served by Nginx. This is a very basic example and can be customized based on your requirements.

user nginx;
worker_processes 1;

error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;

log_format main ‘$remote_addr — $remote_user [$time_local] “$request” ‘
‘$status $body_bytes_sent “$http_referer” ‘
‘“$http_user_agent” “$http_x_forwarded_for”’;

access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main;

sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;

server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;

location / {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.html index.htm;
}

error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
}
}
}