Service Proxying with Matt Klein Holiday Repeat

Originally posted on 14 February 2017.

Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy.

At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service runs a tool called Envoy. Envoy is a service proxy. Whenever a service sends or receives a request, that request goes through Envoy before meeting its destination.

Matt Klein started Envoy, and he joins the show to explain why it is useful to have this layer of standardization between services. He also gives some historical context for why Envoy was so helpful to Lyft.