The Microservices.com Practitioners Summit , is a practitioner-driven microservices conference, that focuses on real-world applications of adopting microservices at scale. The Summit will be held in San Francisco on January 31, 2017. Speakers include microservices practitioners from Uber, New Relic, Lyft, PayPal, and Google.
Matt Klein is a senior software engineer at Lyft , and will be speaking at the Summit. Klein works on Envoy , a Layer 7 communications bus, used throughout Lyft’s service-oriented architecture.
Prior to the summit, InfoQ met with Klein to discuss the benefits of creating a custom tool for Lyft’s networking needs, and how it could benefit other microservices architectures.
InfoQ: Modern service-oriented architectures rely heavily on network communication and RPC calls, instead of inline processing within a monolith. How does Envoy help to improve the dependency on a complex network infrastructure?
Matt Klein : Over the last 5-10 years we have seen a couple of major shifts in SoA. Primarily, lots more folks are building SoA, and doing it earlier in an infrastructure’s lifecycle. More importantly, we see a lot of companies with «polyglot» language deployments (3+ languages in use at all times).
Historically, most of the complexity around sophisticated SoA networking has been accomplished via very complicated libraries. This includes load balancing, routing, service discovery, retry, rate limiting, circuit breaking, stats, logging, tracing, etc. Unless an organization uses very few languages or has a lot of resources, it becomes nearly impossible to have sophisticated networking libraries for every production language.
Envoy is an out of process high performance proxy that solves common SoA networking problems in one place.