Running Envoy on VMs Without Kubernetes
· 9 min read
Envoy does not need Kubernetes. It is a single static binary that reads a bootstrap file and, if you let it, fetches the rest of its configuration from a control plane over xDS. Many teams run it on virtual machines or bare metal as an edge proxy, an API gateway or a load balancer in front of services that will never move into a cluster.
What Kubernetes and a service mesh normally give you for free is everything around the binary: a bootstrap for each proxy, a connection to a control plane, a supervisor that restarts it, a way to upgrade it, and a path for its logs and metrics. This post lists what you have to provide yourself on a VM, and then shows how the Elchi edge agent, elchi-client, provides each piece.