CNCF Atlas

English

日本語

English

日本語

Appearance

History ​

Origin ​

Envoy started at Lyft. Matt Klein joined from Twitter in May 2015, while Lyft was moving from a monolith to more than 30 microservices. The team could not see what the network was doing: ELB and CloudWatch did not surface P50 or P99 latency, so failures were hard to diagnose. Network observability was the main motivation for a new proxy (How Lyft Invented Envoy).

NGINX and HAProxy were fast but offered little beyond L4/L7 routing, and a Finagle-style per-language library did not fit a polyglot service fleet. Lyft chose an out-of-process proxy written in modern C++ for performance. Development began in May 2015 and an MVP was deployed in early September 2015 (How Lyft Invented Envoy).

Timeline ​

YearMilestone
2015Development starts at Lyft (May); MVP deployed in production (early September).
2016All Lyft services run behind Envoy with client-side load balancing (early 2016); open-sourced on 2016-09-14.
2017Donated to the CNCF on 2017-09-13 as its 11th hosted project.
2018Graduated from the CNCF on 2018-11-28, the 3rd project to do so after Kubernetes and Prometheus.

How it evolved ​

By early 2016 every Lyft service ran behind Envoy using client-side load balancing, and by that summer it covered both edge and service-to-service traffic across hundreds of services at millions of requests per second (How Lyft Invented Envoy).

After the 2016-09-14 open-source release, engineers from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and eBay reached out, and adoption ran ahead of expectations (5 years of Envoy OSS). That external interest fed the xDS configuration APIs, which turned Envoy into a data plane that other control planes could drive.

Envoy joined the CNCF on 2017-09-13 as its 11th hosted project (Envoy joins the CNCF) and graduated on 2018-11-28, following Kubernetes and Prometheus (CNCF project page).

Where it stands now ​

The repository pins API version 3.0.0 (API_VERSION.txt) and carries 1.39.0-dev in VERSION.txt, with v1.38.2 released on 2026-06-10 as the nearest tag. Governance is documented in GOVERNANCE.md, which defines maintainer tiers and a voting process. The CNCF project page reports a graduated project with thousands of contributors (CNCF project page).