What is the role of Envoy as a sidecar proxy?

Envoy functions as a sidecar proxy primarily to handle traffic to and from a service. This role is crucial in microservices architectures, where Envoy can manage service-to-service communication effectively. By placing Envoy alongside application instances, it can intercept all incoming and outgoing network traffic, allowing it to provide load balancing, service discovery, traffic routing, and telemetry.

This traffic management capability also enables Envoy to perform various advanced networking tasks such as retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking, ensuring that services maintain high availability and resilience. Therefore, the integration of Envoy as a sidecar proxy enhances overall service reliability and performance in distributed systems, making it an essential component for managing communication in cloud-native applications.