In this blogpost we’ll talk about the old Nginx-based traffic infrastructure, its pain points, and the benefits we gained by migrating to Envoy. We’ll compare Nginx to Envoy across many software engineering and operational dimensions. We’ll also briefly touch on the migration process, its current state, and some of the problems encountered on the way.

Envoy, for the uninitiated, is a proxy server “designed for cloud-native applications”. It was created by Lyft and used by a lot of big players in the cloud/services world.

Not only is this article interesting as a “switching” story, it’s also fascinating because of the scale of the migration:

When we moved most of Dropbox traffic to Envoy, we had to seamlessly migrate a system that already handles tens of millions of open connections, millions of requests per second, and terabits of bandwidth.

High stakes!