The CNCF-graduated project Envoy Proxy was recently announced as generally available on Windows. Starting with version 1.18.3, engineers can use the Envoy proxy on Windows for production workloads.
Sotiris Nanopoulos, engineer at Microsoft, said that the Envoy-Windows-Development group worked together to get Envoy on Windows over the last year. Thanking the Envoy developer community and maintainers, Nanopoulos stated that post the alpha release in October 2020, there is improved performance and reliability of Envoy.
To get started, operators and developers can utilize the container images on the Docker Hub. These lightweight images are equipped with various SDKs and tools in order to experiment with Envoy.
With a lack of support for edge-triggered change notifications on Windows Server 2019, Envoy on Windows ended up draining CPU resources. Version 1.18.3 supports synthetic edge events, which behave like edge events. As inferred from the integration tests, which uses synthetic edge events, there is a considerable improvement in the polling mechanism. This allows scaling for multiple concurrent connections.
Stream access loggers enable operators to redirect access logs from listeners and the admin portal to the process's standard output. This will improve diagnostics when running Envoy on different platforms with the same configuration. Additionally, to provide ease for developers and Windows native operators, Envoy process management has been enhanced since the alpha release. Envoy terminates gracefully when Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Break commands are sent to the console. Experimental support for Envoy as a Windows Service is also available.
During the last year, the contribution from the Windows Development Group consisted of 189 patches to the Envoy repository. Supporting two compilers , three runtimes (win32 native, SCM, and containers), and multiple versions of Windows, the group recently released the latest version, 1.19.0. Readers interested in detailed statistics can head over to this dashboard.
Envoy for Windows comes with support for Clang on Windows. From January 2021, for every commit, envoy.exe is built with both Clang and MSVC compilers.
Commenting about the future, Nanopoulos said that the group is looking forward to improving the distribution of binaries, performance and integration with Service Mesh solutions like Open Service Mesh for the upcoming Windows Server 2022 release.
Readers can get involved by joining the Envoy Slack Workspace and reaching out to contributors in the #envoy-windows-dev channel. In addition to the FAQ on the documentation website, GitHub issues are monitored, alongside discussions in envoy-dev and envoy-announce Google groups.
As a side note, the 4th annual EnvoyCon is happening on October 11th alongside KubeCon NA 2021. The schedule for the event will be announced on August 25th, 2021.