The Envoy Operator project is a Kubernetes Operator. Its purpose is to enable easy deployment of Envoy proxies using a high level declarative API.

The Envoy Operator currently supports deploying proxies as standalone pods, but will soon support injecting Envoy proxies as sidecar containers into existing pods to serve as transparent proxies for use in a service mesh such as Istio.

The Envoy Operator was built using the operator sdk.

Deploy the Operator:

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/envoy-operator/master/deploy/rbac.yaml
kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/envoy-operator/master/deploy/crd.yaml
kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/solo-io/envoy-operator/master/deploy/operator.yaml

Create an Envoy pod configured to use ads-service.default.svc.cluster.local as its xDS server:

cat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
apiVersion: "envoy.solo.io/v1alpha1"
kind: "Envoy"
metadata:
  name: "myingress"
spec:
  adsServer: ads-service.default.svc.cluster.local
  adsPort: 8081
  clusterIdTemplate: ingress
  nodeIdTemplate: "ingress-{{.PodName}}"
EOF

The operator transforms the Envoy spec defined here to a deployment and a configmap that contains Envoy's static config file.

Note that some of the parameters are templates. these templates can be filled with the kube downward api. Example:

apiVersion: "envoy.solo.io/v1alpha1"
kind: "Envoy"
metadata:
  name: "myingress"
spec:
  ...
  nodeIdTemplate: "{{.PodName}}"

The node id given to each Envoy will match its pod name.

The full template interpolation interface is defined here and should cover all of the downward API (labels and annotations included).

This operator's main uses case is with an ADS-enabled xDS server such as Gloo. We are looking to hear more from the community about what other uses cases are of interest.

• SSL \ mTLS configuration
• Pod Injection
• Provide Locality information for zone aware routing.
• Hot Restarts

Please join us on our slack channel https://slack.solo.io/ with any questions, feedback, or suggestions.