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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# Consul vs. Envoy and Other Proxies
Modern service proxies provide high-level service routing, authentication,
telemetry, and more for microservice and cloud environments. Envoy is
Proxies provide excellent solutions to layer 7 concerns such as path-based
routing, tracing and telemetry, and more. By supporting a pluggable data plane model, the right proxy can be
deployed as needed.
For performance-critical applications or those
that utilize layey 7 functionality, Envoy can be used. For non-performance critical layer 4 applications, you can use Consul's [built-in proxy](https://www.consul.io/docs/connect/proxies/built-in.html) for convenience.