# Envoy Proxy

14 Hacker News commenters recommended Envoy Proxy and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a reverse proxy and API gateway, valued for zero-downtime configuration changes and extensibility. The common caveat is that its configs are complex and hard for humans to maintain.

## Why people recommend it

- Reverse proxy and API gateway (4 comments): "just use an api gateway (ie., a reverse proxy for apis), eg., envoy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49788474)) "Use envoy or some other reverse proxy and do per-app auth there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777726)) "Nginx / envoy should be your default choice for most use cases." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50252405))
- Zero-downtime config changes (2 comments): "With a custom controller, Envoy never dropped a connection or request we didn't explicitly tell it to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937763)) "you can do truly zero downtime configuration changes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924119))
- Extensible, handles server streaming (2 comments): "it works well, even server streaming." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117860)) "envoy is pretty extensible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253396))

## What people warn about

- Complex configs, hard to maintain (3 comments): "Envoy is great if you programmatically configure it, or if you have very small and simple configs. It can't be maintained by a human." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923720)) "the operational weight of Envoy is exactly the complexity I'm trying to spare people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199876)) "envoy configs are unreadable abominations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923664))
- Limited gateway support and metrics (2 comments): "Even core networking things like Istio/Envoy only have limited gateway support compared to ingress" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47922676)) "the available metrics are limited to connection-level information" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445698))
- Heavy C++ codebase and dependency (2 comments): "Envoy being written in C++ has always given me a gut feeling to avoid Envoy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261803)) "envoy required dependency, no thanks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50325697))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Traefik](https://hackerapproved.com/p/traefik.md): 27 recommend
- [Kubernetes Ingress NGINX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ingress-nginx.md): 8 recommend
- [Tailscale Serve](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tailscale-serve.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Envoy Proxy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/envoy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).