Envoy: Comparison to linkerd

Created on 26 Sep 2016 · 8Comments · Source: envoyproxy/envoy

The documentation's comparison list is both thorough and useful. Thanks for that!

Would you consider adding a brief comparison to linkerd? It's based on Finagle, so I would expect the existing section to cover most of the details, but as a proxy product, linkerd is even more similar to Envoy (and a competitor).

aredocs

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jparise

Most helpful comment

Here's what we came up with:

linkerd is a standalone, open source RPC routing proxy built on Netty and Finagle. linkerd offers many of Finagle’s features, including latency-aware load balancing, connection pooling, circuit-breaking, retry budgets, deadlines, tracing, fine-grained instrumentation, and a traffic routing layer for request-level routing. linkerd provides a pluggable service discovery interface (with standard support for Consul and ZooKeeper, as well as the Marathon and Kubernetes APIs).

linkerd’s memory and CPU requirements are significantly higher than Envoy’s. However, its underlying tech is extensively production tested and widely deployed. In contrast to Envoy, linkerd provides a minimalist configuration language, and explicitly does not support hot reloads, relying instead on dynamic provisioning and service abstractions. linkerd supports HTTP/1.1, Thrift, ThriftMux, HTTP/2 (experimental) and gRPC (experimental).

If there's anything else you think should be addressed, just let us know!

olix0r on 30 Sep 2016

👍8

All 8 comments

Sure, we can add a comparison.

@olix0r let me know if you or someone from Bouyant wants to write the comparison. You can email me offline to discuss if you want. Otherwise I will write it.

mattklein123 on 26 Sep 2016

Thanks for looping me in, @mattklein123. I'll talk to the team this morning and find a volunteer.

olix0r on 26 Sep 2016

👍1

Here's what we came up with:

linkerd is a standalone, open source RPC routing proxy built on Netty and Finagle. linkerd offers many of Finagle’s features, including latency-aware load balancing, connection pooling, circuit-breaking, retry budgets, deadlines, tracing, fine-grained instrumentation, and a traffic routing layer for request-level routing. linkerd provides a pluggable service discovery interface (with standard support for Consul and ZooKeeper, as well as the Marathon and Kubernetes APIs).

linkerd’s memory and CPU requirements are significantly higher than Envoy’s. However, its underlying tech is extensively production tested and widely deployed. In contrast to Envoy, linkerd provides a minimalist configuration language, and explicitly does not support hot reloads, relying instead on dynamic provisioning and service abstractions. linkerd supports HTTP/1.1, Thrift, ThriftMux, HTTP/2 (experimental) and gRPC (experimental).

If there's anything else you think should be addressed, just let us know!

olix0r on 30 Sep 2016

👍8

Sure that sounds fine. I will do a PR to get it in.

mattklein123 on 30 Sep 2016

https://github.com/lyft/envoy/pull/145

mattklein123 on 12 Oct 2016

The comparison is now at https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/comparison for those coming from search engines.

jamiely on 21 Dec 2017

👍5

All comparison pages are gone now. Where can we get a link to a comparison?

rafaelcaricio on 21 Feb 2020

Maintaining accurate comparisons is time consuming. There are a number of third party sites that provide this information like https://layer5.io/landscape