Launching Envoy Fundamentals, a training course to enable faster adoption of Envoy Proxy

Also published on: CNCF

Envoy Proxy, an open-source edge and service proxy, is a vital part of today’s modern, cloud-native application and is used in production by large companies like Booking.com, Pinterest, and Airbnb(Source). Tetrate, a top contributor to Envoy, has developed Envoy Fundamentals, free training with a completion certificate, to help enterprises adopt the technology faster. It will enable DevOps users, SREs, developers, and other community members to learn Envoy easily with concept text, practical labs, and quizzes. Tetrate is also the creator of the popular Istio Fundamentals training course and the open-source project Func-e, which makes it easier to adopt Envoy. 

“I am excited about Tetrate’s Envoy Fundamentals course and certification. It is well composed with information on the applications of Envoy and practical labs with step-by-step instructions and quizzes,” said Matt Klein, creator of Envoy Proxy and senior engineer at Lyft. “You will be rewarded with a certificate for completing the full course. Best of all, the training is entirely free. I highly recommend this course to people who want to learn and use Envoy Proxy.” 

Envoy is the default choice for building a service mesh

The CNCF-graduated project Envoy Proxy is the most popular sidecar and ingress provider. It’s the default sidecar in multiple service mesh projects, including Istio, Open Service Mesh, and Appmesh. As per CNCF’s 2020 survey, the usage of Envoy as an ingress provider increased 116%, with a total of 37% of respondents using Envoy Proxy in production. 

Envoy was initially built at Lyft as a proxy to serve as a universal data plane for large-scale microservice service mesh architectures. The idea is to have Envoy sidecars run next to each service in your application, abstracting the network from the application. It works as an edge gateway, service mesh, and hybrid networking bridge. With Envoy, companies can scale their microservices by providing a more flexible release process and a highly available and resilient infrastructure.

Envoy is rich in its network-related features such as retries, timeouts, traffic routing and mirroring, TLS termination, observability, and many more. As all network traffic flows through the mesh of Envoy proxies, it becomes necessary to observe traffic and problem areas, fine-tune the performance, and pinpoint any latency sources from a single place. With its many features and vast APIs, it might be overwhelming for users to navigate the extensive and comprehensive documentation, especially for beginners unfamiliar with proxies and just starting with their Envoy journey. Therefore, we decided to create a course that introduces the basic concepts of Envoy and its internals to enable a faster learning curve for users.

“Envoy has seen a rapid increase in adoption over the past years. This means access to easy-to-learn resources that provide users the ability to scale fast in their learning is crucial to keep Envoy adoption easier,” said Varun Talwar, Tetrate Co-founder.

About the Envoy Fundamentals Course 

The free Envoy fundamentals course consists of 8 modules, with multiple video lessons and labs within each module. 

The course starts with an introduction to Envoy and explains concepts such as HTTP connection manager filter, clusters, listeners, logging, administrative interface, and extending Envoy.  Each module includes practical labs with step-by-step instructions. The labs allow learners to practice explained concepts such as 

• Configuration of dynamic Envoy
• Circuit breakers
• Traffic splitting
• Mirror requests
• Global and local rate-limiting
• HTTP tap filter
• Extending Envoy using Lua script and Wasm, and more. 

Quizzes after each module help you evaluate your knowledge and gauge your progress. After completing the course and all quizzes, you’ll receive a certificate of completion. Sign up for the free Envoy Fundamentals course on the Tetrate Academy website to start learning.

More resources to learn Envoy

• Get started with Envoy in 5 minutes (blog)
• Envoy 101: File-based dynamic configurations (blog)
• Istio Weekly: Envoy fundamentals (video)
• Istio Weekly: Developing Envoy Wasm Extensions (video)
• Envoy deep dive (video)
• Lyft’s Envoy: Embracing a service mesh (video)
• Making Envoy contributions feasible for everyone (video)

About Tetrate

Started by Istio founders and Envoy maintainers to reimagine application networking, Tetrate is the enterprise service mesh company managing the complexity of modern, hybrid cloud application infrastructure. Its flagship product, Tetrate Service Bridge, provides a comprehensive, enterprise-ready service mesh platform built for multi-cluster, multitenancy, and multi-cloud deployments. Customers get consistent, baked-in observability, runtime security, and traffic management in any environment. Tetrate remains a top contributor to the open-source projects Istio and Envoy Proxy, and its team includes senior maintainers of Envoy.