Envoy Proxy
Hacker ApprovedRanked 4 of 7 reverse proxies by recommenders
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.
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.
21 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 14
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 14 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Reverse proxy and API gateway
“just use an api gateway (ie., a reverse proxy for apis), eg., envoy”
Comment from 21 Sep 2026 in “MCP was always a bad idea?” “Use envoy or some other reverse proxy and do per-app auth there”
Comment from 3 Jul 2026 in “Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access” “Nginx / envoy should be your default choice for most use cases.”
Comment from 26 Oct 2026 in “Native Prometheus Integration with Nginx” - Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent”
Zero-downtime config changes
“With a custom controller, Envoy never dropped a connection or request we didn't explicitly tell it to”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “Kubernetes Ingress Nginx is retiring” “you can do truly zero downtime configuration changes”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Kubernetes Ingress Nginx is retiring” Extensible, handles server streaming
“it works well, even server streaming.”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Why I stopped using JSON for my APIs” “envoy is pretty extensible”
Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Native Prometheus Integration with Nginx”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Complex configs, hard to maintain
“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.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Kubernetes Ingress Nginx is retiring” “the operational weight of Envoy is exactly the complexity I'm trying to spare people”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Sōzune – a reverse proxy built on Sōzu, with Traefik-style autodiscovery” “envoy configs are unreadable abominations”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Kubernetes Ingress Nginx is retiring” Limited gateway support and metrics
“Even core networking things like Istio/Envoy only have limited gateway support compared to ingress”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)” “the available metrics are limited to connection-level information”
Comment from 31 Dec 2025 in “Zero-Code Instrumentation of an Envoy TCP Proxy Using eBPF” Heavy C++ codebase and dependency
“Envoy being written in C++ has always given me a gut feeling to avoid Envoy.”
Comment from 27 Oct 2026 in “Native Prometheus Integration with Nginx” “envoy required dependency, no thanks”
Comment from 1 Nov 2026 in “Will Agent Resource Registries ever have their moment, the way AI gateways did?”
Other reverse proxies people recommend
The four most recommended other reverse proxies, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pangolin | 37 | 6 | 86% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Traefik | 27 | 8 | 77% | 10 | — | Approved |
| HAProxy | 24 | 2 | 92% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Envoy ProxyThis page | 14 | 7 | 67% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Nginx Proxy Manager | 10 | 0 | 100% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
21 of the 24 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“envoy required dependency, no thanks”
“Envoy being written in C++ has always given me a gut feeling to avoid Envoy.”
“envoy is pretty extensible”
“Nginx / envoy should be your default choice for most use cases.”
“just use an api gateway (ie., a reverse proxy for apis), eg., envoy”
“I think such setups are at least as secure as having tailscale in front of it and they are web standards conform.”
“There's gRPC-web but it's heavy, uses Envoy.”
“Use envoy or some other reverse proxy and do per-app auth there”
“the operational weight of Envoy is exactly the complexity I'm trying to spare people”
“Even core networking things like Istio/Envoy only have limited gateway support compared to ingress”
“A bunch of Envoy based gateway proxies fail on internal ipv6 resources in a k8s cluster that runs on ARM64.”
“envoy for egress with whitelists and credential injection”
“I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to”
“Envoy dataplane + tiny routing LLMs is a solid combo for agent handoffs without the usual orchestration bloat.”
“the available metrics are limited to connection-level information”
“it works well, even server streaming.”
“With a custom controller, Envoy never dropped a connection or request we didn't explicitly tell it to”
“it's pretty straightforward if you think about it in terms of the networking layers involved in processing a request”
“you can do truly zero downtime configuration changes”
“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.”
“envoy configs are unreadable abominations”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.