Envoy Project
CNCF-graduated foundation behind Envoy Proxy and Envoy AI Gateway
The Envoy Project is a CNCF-graduated open-source community maintaining Envoy Proxy and Envoy AI Gateway. The AI Gateway uses Envoy Gateway to handle traffic between application clients and generative AI services, routing across Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Mistral, OpenAI, and more, with Model Context Protocol support and OAuth authentication. Adopters include Bloomberg, Tencent Cloud, Nutanix, LY Corporation, and Tetrate.
Origin
Envoy was created inside Lyft in 2015 by Matt Klein as a service proxy to handle the challenges of running a growing microservices architecture, then open-sourced in September 2016. It joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2017 and graduated in 2018 — one of the earliest CNCF graduated projects alongside Kubernetes and Prometheus.
Flagship products
- Envoy Proxy — high-performance C++ L4/L7 proxy that powers service mesh data planes (Istio, Consul, AWS App Mesh, Gloo) and countless API gateway deployments. Over 100K+ production deployments.
- Envoy Gateway — Kubernetes Gateway API implementation built on Envoy Proxy, aimed at simplifying its use as an API gateway.
- Envoy AI Gateway — adds AI-native routing, rate limits, cost tracking, and MCP support on top of Envoy Gateway for teams running generative AI workloads.
- Envoy Mobile — same proxy embedded as a client library in iOS and Android apps.
Ecosystem
Envoy's xDS protocol is the de-facto standard for dynamic proxy configuration. Projects using Envoy as their data plane include Istio, Consul Connect, Google Cloud Traffic Director, AWS App Mesh, Kuma, Gloo, and Tetrate Service Bridge.
Governance
Runs under CNCF with an independent steering committee. Major contributors include Google, Microsoft, Lyft, Bloomberg, Tetrate, Solo.io, and Tencent.
Tools from Envoy Project
