FAQ

Why EnRoute ?

EnRoute is a generic control plane to drive one or a fleet of envoy proxies. EnRoute can work as a Kubernetes Ingress Controller, a Standalone API Gateway or a control plane to drive multiple Envoy proxies.

EnRoute is not dependent on kubernetes but integrates with kubernetes depending on the use-case.

While there are other Kubernetes Ingress Controllers and Proxies, EnRoute is focused on the API Gateway use-case using Envoy.

How does EnRoute drive Envoy?

EnRoute populates the cache of an xDS server that feeds Envoy. This Envoy can be running either at Kubernetes Ingress or Standalone.

How can I interface EnRoute?

EnRoute can be driven using simple REST APIs or a GraphQL client or Kubernetes CRDs or enroutectl CLI tool. Depending on the use-case and flexibility required, there are several options to program EnRoute.

How stable is EnRoute?

EnRoute is fairly stable and is used in production today. EnRoute leverages existing stable open source projects to build upon them.

The data path component is an unmodified vanilla Envoy proxy.

How is EnRoute different?

EnRoute is focused on API gateway use-cases and features. While being an API Gateway, the primary focus for EnRoute was simplicity. EnRoute achieves simplicity by maintaining filter/plugin abstractions similar to Envoy

EnRoute can also work Standalone and maintains a consistent configuration model across Standalone and Kubernetes Ingress.

How is EnRoute different from Service Mesh?

EnRoute is not a service mesh. EnRoute only provides traffic management for North-South traffic as a Kubernetes Ingress Controller or a Standalone Docker Gateway

Meshes typically are optimized for east-west traffic management and zero trust using mTLS. EnRoute today supports functionality typically associated with North-South gateways.

EnRoute does not have a built in secret store or an identity provider. EnRoute is built to integrate with external identity and secret providers. EnRoute is built for bring-your-own-(identity/secret store/environment)

Acknowledgements

We’d like to acknowledge the following amazing projects - Hasura , Contour , Envoy Proxy , Labstack Echo