What are the primary functions of Envoy in a service mesh?

The primary functions of Envoy in a service mesh revolve around its capabilities in service discovery, traffic management, and load balancing. Envoy serves as a high-performance proxy that facilitates communication between microservices, making it essential for managing the flow of data across distributed systems.

Service discovery allows Envoy to dynamically locate available services in a microservices architecture, which is crucial as services can scale up or down. Traffic management encompasses the ability to control the routing of requests, enabling features such as canary deployments, traffic splitting, and retries, thereby enhancing overall system resilience. Load balancing is also a critical function, as Envoy efficiently distributes incoming requests across various service instances, optimizing resource utilization and minimizing response times.

While other functions such as data storage, user authentication, and backup services are important in the context of application development and infrastructure management, they are not the core focus of what Envoy is designed to do within a service mesh architecture.