56 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
56 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
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---
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layout: "intro"
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page_title: "Consul vs. Envoy and Other Proxies"
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sidebar_current: "vs-other-proxies"
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description: |-
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Modern service proxies provide high-level service routing, authentication, telemetry, and more for microservice and cloud environments. Envoy is a popular and feature rich proxy. This page describes how Consul relates to proxies such as Envoy.
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---
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# Consul vs. Envoy and Other Proxies
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Modern service proxies provide high-level service routing, authentication,
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telemetry, and more for microservice and cloud environments. Envoy is
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a popular and feature rich proxy.
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Proxies require a rich set of configuration to operate since backend
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addresses, frontend listeners, routes, filters, telemetry shipping, and
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more must all be configured. Further, a modern infrastructure contains
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many proxies, often one proxy per service as proxies are deployed in
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a "sidecar" model next to a service. Therefore, a primary challenge of
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proxies is the configuration sprawl and orchestration.
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Proxies form what is referred to as the "data plane": the pathway which
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data travels for network connections. Above this is the "control plane"
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which provides the rules and configuration for the data plane. Proxies
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typically integrate with outside solutions to provide the control plane.
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For example, Envoy integrates with Consul to dynamically populate
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service backend addresses.
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Consul is a control plane solution. The service catalog serves as a registry
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for services and their addresses and can be used to route traffic for proxies.
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The Connect feature of Consul provides the TLS certificates and service
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access graph, but still requires a proxy to exist in the data path. As a
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control plane, Consul integrates with many data plane solutions including
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Envoy, HAProxy, Nginx, and more.
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Consul provides a built-in proxy written in Go. This trades performance
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for ease of use: by being built-in to Consul, users of Consul can get
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started with solutions such as Connect without needing to install other
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software. But the built-in proxy isn't meant to compete on features or
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performance with dedicated proxy solutions such as Envoy. Consul enables
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third party proxies to integrate with Connect and provide the data
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plane with Consul operating as the control plane.
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The Connect feature of Consul operates at layer 4 by authorizing a TLS
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connection to succeed or fail. Proxies provide excellent solutions to
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layer 7 concerns such as path-based routing, tracing and telemetry, and
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more. Consul encourages using any proxy that provides the featureset required
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by the user.
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Further, by supporting a pluggable data plane model, the right proxy can be
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deployed as needed. For non-performance critical applications, the built-in
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proxy can be used. For performance critical applicaiotns, Envoy can be used.
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For some applications that may require hardware, a hardware load balancer
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such an F5 appliance may be deployed. Consul provides an API for all of these
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solutions to be integrated.
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