A new documentary for anyone interested in how open source technology works behind the scenes to shape our future

AMSTERDAM–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Speakeasy Productions in partnership with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced today the launch of “Inside Envoy: the Proxy for the Future,” a documentary film that give viewers an inside look at the journey from creation to mass adoption of Envoy, one of the most useful open source projects in the world today.

Envoy was one of the most important open source innovations in the transition from monolithic architecture to microservices, as its high-performance service proxy enabled efficient communication, load balancing, and helped to abstract away the complexities of service-to-service communication. Now used by thousands of companies, Envoy accelerated the adoption of microservices across the industry.

The Envoy film features prominent innovators, executives and engineers who tell the story of Envoy’s inception and growth to become the game-changing technology it is today—celebrated by hundreds of thousands of developers and companies across the globe.

“It took just a few short years for Envoy to become a vital tool in the development of cloud technology,” said Josiah McGarvie, Director and Co-Producer at Speakeasy Productions. “It is a classic example of how the most significant tech innovations often emerge from the work of just one or two engineers quietly working to solve a problem.”

Envoy was started by software engineer, Matt Klein, after he joined Lyft in 2015 after leaving Twitter. At the time, Lyft was struggling with the migration from a monolithic to microservices architecture – as many companies in growth periods do. After experiencing all the typical microservice migration problems, Klein set to work on what would become Envoy, coding alone for three months to create the first version. Initially introduced as an edge proxy, Envoy evolved to handle 100% of Lyft traffic and has since broadened its scope beyond observability. By mid-2016, Envoy was used for all network communication at Lyft. Envoy was open sourced in the fall of 2016 and quickly gained adoption. In 2017, Envoy joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Today, Envoy serves trillions of daily requests and has been adopted by thousands of organizations around the world.

“Inside Envoy: the Proxy for the Future” is the second major release from Speakeasy Productions, which is leading the way in using the power of film and storytelling to demystify core open source software projects that change how we live, work, and play.

Speakeasy Productions’ other major documentary, “Inside Prometheus: An Open Source System That Changed Technology,” showcased the development of the Prometheus open source project. Prior, Speakeasy Productions collaborated on a two-part series dedicated to the origin and growth of Kubernetes, the container orchestrator at the heart of the microservices revolution.

“These films document the explosive growth and impact of two of the greatest technology innovations in recent history: open source software and cloud native computing,” said Chad Torbin, Co-Producer at Speakeasy Productions. “We want to spread the word so that our open source community continues to grow, innovate and help create untold value that benefits all of us. Speakeasy Productions aims to support many more such films because this ecosystem creates projects that deserve to be known and understood even outside of the community.”

“Inside Envoy: the Proxy for the Future” debuted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam.

The film was made possible by technology providers and community leaders including Ambassador Labs, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Lyft, Solo.io and Tetrate.

To learn more and view the documentary, please visit the official film website: https://envoyprojectdocumentary.com

Contributor Quotes

“In my wildest dreams I never would have imagined that Envoy would become what it is today. The project’s success is a testament to the hard work of the entire community: maintainers; contributors; and end users. I’m thrilled to be able to share the origin story of the project in documentary form.” – Matt Klein, Software Engineer and Envoy project creator.

“When we introduced Matt Klein at the Microservices Practitioner Summit in early 2017, I knew from his talk that Envoy was the future. Since then, we’ve seen Envoy’s community grow and adoption skyrocket. The massive adoption of Envoy across organizations both big and small is a testament to Matt’s early recognition that the cloud-native world is also a L7 world. It’s exciting to see the Envoy project getting the attention it deserves with this documentary and we’re thrilled to be part of it.” – Richard Li, Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Ambassador Labs.

“Envoy is an exceptional open source project and an inspiring tale of how a community can change an entire industry by finding and solving critical technology gaps within the application development process. Having a first-hand seat during the early days of the project, it’s been amazing to see Envoy become a key component powering services across thousands of companies today. I’m so thrilled there’s a film that celebrates these amazing innovators, who have unleashed an open source solution that has grown far beyond what anyone initially imagined.” – Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

“Envoy has become a foundational part of how companies manage APIs and microservices at scale. The flexibility of the Envoy architecture has enabled Solo.io to bring incredible products to market. But more importantly, those Envoy-enabled products are positively impacting the day-to-day experiences for millions of people around the world. We’re thankful to be part of the Envoy community, and we look forward to continuing to advance this amazing technology. We hope everyone enjoys the documentary.” – Idit Levine, Founder|CEO of Solo.io.

“While at Google, my team gave us Istio, and Matt gave us Envoy. This one-two punch is fundamentally changing how enterprises architect and operate cloud-native application portfolios securely and at scale. Matt’s work with our team has brought immeasurable energy and insight to Tetrate. His expertise has helped us bring an Istio-powered product lineup to market, from open source distro and support all the way through to an EKS-optimized service mesh and a fully managed and full-featured offering. We’re excited about the future of Envoy, including the Envoy Gateway API and further development of WASM. But mostly, we congratulate Matt on this well-deserved honor via the Envoy documentary premiere at KubeCon Europe.” – Varun Talwar, co-founder of Tetrate.

About Speakeasy Productions

Speakeasy Productions, a division of Speakeasy Strategies, is on a mission to empower technology companies and open source communities to showcase their stories of the unsung technology heroes who are changing the way we live and work. Through the development and production of documentary films, we aim to demystify core open source projects and the world of back-end developers to move them out of the shadows and forward into the hearts and minds of millions.

Contacts

Speakeasy Productions 

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415.548.6536