Envoy Proxy Deep Dive: L7 Routing, Observability & Zero-Trust Traffic Control for Modern Cloud-Native Systems is a hands-on, operator-first guide to building, running, and defending production-grade traffic platforms with Envoy Proxy.
This is not an introductory proxy book-and it is not a collection of disconnected configuration snippets. It is a complete, end-to-end blueprint for platform engineers, SREs, and security engineers who need Envoy to work reliably under real-world conditions: constant change, partial failure, security constraints, and operational pressure.
You will start by building a correct mental model of Envoy's internals-listeners, filter chains, routes, clusters, endpoints-and then apply that model to real systems. From there, the book walks you through modern L7 routing patterns, resilience engineering, and dynamic configuration at scale using xDS and SDS. Every concept is tied to practical configuration, validation steps, and failure modes, so you understand not only how something works, but how it breaks.
A core focus of this book is zero-trust traffic control. You will implement mTLS end-to-end, enforce identity-aware routing, validate JWTs, apply RBAC policies, integrate external authorization services, and prove isolation with automated negative tests. Security is treated as an operational discipline-not a checkbox-and is validated continuously through testing and drills.
Observability is built in from the beginning. You will wire Envoy into Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, define the signals that actually matter, and learn how to debug production incidents using config dumps, metrics, logs, and traces-without guesswork. Performance tuning, capacity planning, and cost-aware observability are covered with a 2025-2026 lens, ensuring the platform remains efficient as it scales.
The centerpiece of the book is a full-stack capstone project. You will build a complete Envoy-based traffic platform-edge gateway, internal sidecars, dynamic control plane, observability stack, and governance model-run acceptance tests, execute failure drills (canary promotion, endpoint churn, control-plane outages, certificate rotation failures), and produce an ops-ready runbook pack suitable for real production teams.
This book is ideal for:
- Platform engineers designing gateways, meshes, or internal traffic platforms
- SREs responsible for reliability, rollouts, and incident response
- Security engineers implementing zero-trust and policy enforcement
- Teams operating Envoy beyond "hello world" Kubernetes examples
By the end of this book, you will not just know Envoy-you will be able to operate it with confidence, evolve it safely, and defend it under failure and audit conditions.
If you are looking for a modern, practical, and production-focused Envoy reference that goes far beyond basic configuration, this book is your definitive guide.
