Introducing Envoy-Based Service Mesh at Booking.com
summary
Booking.com built an Envoy-based service mesh using a custom control plane and exposes config through an open-source tool called Bosphorus so service owners can self-serve. They deploy client-side Envoy proxies near users to handle retries, filters, discovery and policy; gradual rollout and simple default policies mitigated issues like TCP idle/keepalive behavior and complex config composition. Experiments showed a 5–15% latency increase on some flows but improved serviceability and visibility overall.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (10)
- 0:00Envoy service mesh intro
- 3:16Why start Envoy project
- 6:52Client-side proxy benefits
- 9:40Early design principles
- 13:14Config and deployment challenges
- 16:31Service ownership self-service
- 19:21Discovery and scaling with Envoy
- 22:35Performance and latency impact
- 26:11Retry policies for reliability
- 28:19Conclusions and future
related talks
53mService Mesh: What, Why, And How?
30mIntroduction to Service Mesh for DevOps
34mService Mesh for Developers
33mGet to know Envoy - the modern proxy for cloud-native infrastructure - Baptiste Collard
30mA Developer’s Introduction to Service Mesh
53mDo you need a Service Mesh?
34mService Mess to Service Mesh
28mService Mesh: Demystifying Istio