Best way to learn Envoy?

[Thomas Stringer]

Hello, all! I'm a new user to Envoy and I'm looking to dive into it. Use it, learn it, etc. I started to read the docs from cover-to-cover (Getting Started — envoy 1.21.0-dev-26da59 documentation (envoyproxy.io)) but they seem like they're mostly for reference and maybe not meant to be read for learning.

Any good ways you've found to learn Envoy? Good scenarios to work through and setup, configure, use, etc.?

Thanks in advance!

Thomas

[Tony Allen]

Hey Thomas,

This proxy is so flexible and can be used in so many different ways that it's hard to give a good answer without knowing what your learning goals are. That being said, there are a few things that I would personally recommend if you're specifically looking to learn about Envoy data plane features specifically, not Istio:

1. The sandboxes found in the docs. These are great playgrounds for learning features and modeling various configurations.
2. This out-of-date blog post on my local development workflow. It's how I tend to play with binaries I modify.

There's almost certainly other ways, but those are what I'd use and it's nice if you want to just fiddle with configurations and iterate quickly. You can directly cURL the Envoy's admin listener at "/stats" to watch counters increment in real-time too, which is neat.

There is also a whole can of worms on the control plane side fo things, regarding dynamic configuration updates via xDS. If your'e interested in that, definitely read that linked doc. It's written in a way that's useful as an introduction to the topic and not just a reference. Once you have a handle on that, you can try it out for yourself via one of the quick start configs. 

Hopefully you find this useful.

-Tony

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[Tony Allen]

One more thing-

There is a difference between the configuration reference and the architecture overview. For example, there's documentation on listener architecture and also documentation on listener configuration  Two totally different types of information and the architecture overview docs are more useful for your goals.