Envoy Mobile with Matt Klein (Summer Break Repeat)

Originally published July 25, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes.

Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy that was originally developed at Lyft. 

Envoy is often deployed as a sidecar application that runs alongside a service and helps that service by providing features such as routing, rate limiting, telemetry, and security policy. Envoy has gained significant traction in the open source community, and has formed the backbone of popular service mesh projects such as Istio.

Envoy has been mostly used as a backend technology, but the potential applications of Envoy include frontend client applications as well. The goal of Envoy is to make the network easier to work with–and the network includes client applications such as mobile apps running on a phone.

Envoy Mobile is a network proxy for mobile applications. Envoy Mobile brings many of the benefits of Envoy to the mobile client ecosystem. It provides mobile developers with a library that can simplify or abstract away many of the modern advances that have been made in networking in recent years, such as HTTP2, gRPC, and QUIC.

Matt Klein is the creator of Envoy, and he joins the show to discuss Envoy Mobile. Matt describes how the networking challenges of mobile applications are similar to those of backend systems and cloud infrastructure. We discuss the advances in networking technology that Envoy Mobile helps bring to the mobile ecosystem, and also touch on the scalability challenges that Matt is seeing at Lyft.

Transcript

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