Cloud Native Theater | EnvoyCon: Opening Remarks - Kateryna Nezdolii and Erica Hughberg

This talk celebrates the 10th anniversary of Envoy, highlighting its evolution from a project at Lyft to a crucial component within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The speakers reflect on their experiences within the Envoy community and its rapid graduation and adoption due to strong governance and community support. They discuss the introduction of the Envoy Gateway project in 2022, which simplified application management and usage for developers. The talk also touches on the transition from cloud-native technologies to AI integrations, emphasizing their ongoing work within the Envoy AI Gateway project. The speakers invite the audience to engage with the thriving community, stressing the improvements in development accessibility and collaboration.

Oh, we are on, fantastic. This is really exciting that you all came over here, but there are still some people sitting over there and I don't know what they're up to because clearly you know where to be and that is Envoy Con in the Cloud Native Theater. Hello. Hello. Oh, well, Katerina hasn't even got a microphone that works. But welcome people because it's been 10 years. Is

this working now? Not sure. Oh, yes, it works. >> she is live on air. Fantastic. But if you have if you don't already feel old, Envoy is 10 years old. How do you feel about that, Katerina? >> Yeah, I can't really believe this, Erica. It feels like only yesterday I joined the community and tried to run Envoy on my own and build it. Yeah, I I feel

like it's yesterday or at least last year and I always kind of feel it's [snorts] a bit weird when time just flies, but it's also very exciting. Yeah, excited to have you all here today. So, I know that you brought some receipts to really prove to people that it's truly been 10 So, let's look at what's happened over time. So, it feels only yesterday Matt Klein announced

Lyft on his Twitter 2016. And then I joined the CNCF which felt very appropriate for a proxy like Envoy proxy because if you were moving stuff around on the cloud, you need to route to it, too. Yeah, so we really stopped being a a one company product to becoming a vendor neutral product and joining CNCF. And it's the community that grew around it, I think it's so

exciting, full of end users and people that literally had the same problem as Lyft had. So, it's been a fantastic journey. And as it joined the CNCF, it then powered so many more solutions as it graduated really fast. I mean, I didn't graduate school that quickly, so you know. Yeah, that was a great milestone that signaled everyone that the project had strong governance, a very versatile community,

and very good like transparent security profile. Yeah, I think that's really exciting. If you are interested in your free time, you can go and look at what it takes to graduate a project within the CNCF. >> It's a lot of work. It's not that you say like I feel like I'm done now. I'm done with school. I'm No, it's it's actually things you have to go through.

And then things just continued growing because the cloud native ecosystem expanded and you know, Katerina, I know you're very good with Envoy proxy and you're very smart. She's very smart. And well, yeah, look, she doesn't even believe it. Well, That was not what we practiced to say, okay? No. Well, I wasn't very good at figuring out how to manage Envoy proxy, so Envoy Gateway made my life

a lot easier. Yeah, right. So, with the evolution of cloud native APIs, the Envoy Gateway project evolved in 2022. Basically, this was we gained the another subset of maintainers to work on that project. I think, Erica, you were also super active and that's right. I Yeah, so for me, I was a bit of a Envoy fan girl. So, when Envoy Gateway project got announced in the Envoy

ecosystem, I was like, "Oh, that's exciting because now even people like me can use it." And if you see this, does it find graph here in the background? And it's quite exciting because up here it says that we're almost up to 2 and 1/2 million pulls every month for the Envoy Gateway, which I think is mental. So, it's very >> Unbelievable. Yes, unbelievable, isn't it? I feel

like I'm with my crew, though. It feels like I'm not alone. And uh and it also got like stable and GA really quickly, but so it's quite exciting. And you were really involved in Envoy Gateway project as well, so Yeah, only feels like only yesterday Arco told me to announce that it reached GA and thought it's already 2026. And and that's like so crazy cuz then in

the Envoy Gateway community, Dan from Bloomberg came and we're like, "Oh, shouldn't we like do AI Gateway stuff?" Now, I was like, "Do we?" And then I said, "Yes." Now we are in AI era. Yeah, so they're like we've gone from the cloud native era into the AI era. So, there's definitely a lot going on there and even that feels crazy. That was announced in 2024 and

this week here at KubeCon being with all the maintainers of the Envoy AI Gateway, I am one of them. We've been talking about getting to GA for that as well, but we're already running it in production, so you can call us reckless or pioneering, whichever you prefer. So, I think it's been such an exciting process to be part of and meeting wonderful people, Katerina. We don't work

in the same company and just growing together. It's really lovely and uh do we want them to come and hang out with us, these people? Absolutely. Yeah? Right, so in the end of the day, it's all about the community. We wouldn't be here today without your help. We have an amazing community base and maintainers. So, if you are interested to to learn more about the project or

help out, it's now much easier to develop Envoy. Please join us. >> It's so much easier now than it used to be. We even made it easy to extend Envoy to add your own plugins and stuff like that. >> to be a C++ expert anymore. Yes, which I like cuz I'm not one of them.