ESPv2 for Cloud Run and Cloud Functions - Beta Launch
Chris Latimer
TL;DR: We recently launched Extensible Service Proxy (ESP) v2 into beta for Cloud Run and Cloud Functions. It replaces the previous beta solution for using Cloud Endpoints with Cloud Run and Cloud Functions.
Background
The Cloud Endpoints team is working to advance the underlying gateway technology used in the Extensible Service Proxy (ESP). As part of this strategy we are planning to move the underpinnings of the ESP from Nginx to Envoy. The first step we have taken is launching a new Extensible Service Proxy v2 (ESPv2) gateway, currently in beta, that can be used for certain use cases within endpoints.
What is Extensible Service Proxy v2?
Extensible Service Proxy v2 is an Envoy-based service proxy which can run in a similar fashion to ESP. It is seamlessly integrated with the existing Cloud Endpoints services (Google Service Management and Google Service Control) and open source libraries to provide a rich set of features for service producers. See below diagram for the typical deployment of ESPv2 for serverless use cases.
Cloud Endpoints for Cloud Run and Cloud Functions using ESPv2 (beta)
Why ESPv2, Why Envoy?
Behind the scenes at Google, we have found Envoy to be an incredibly useful technology that has become a key part of our networking strategy. Google has invested a great deal of time and resources into building capabilities that allow us to use Envoy to reliably serve traffic at internet scale. Some of these capabilities can be used directly by GCP customers through products such as Traffic Director and Anthos Service Mesh.
As Google Cloud continues to make investments around Envoy, we want to make sure that Cloud Endpoints users can fully benefit from these new capabilities. We also want to be able to leverage the work being done by other GCP teams to help us bring new features to Endpoints users faster. As a result, we have created ESPv2 to help us deliver on these goals.
What can ESPv2 offer today?
A [beta] solution for serverless developers who require Cloud Endpoints capabilities on Cloud Run.
Supports OpenAPI Specification version 2.
Provides all features ESP currently supports, including Stackdriver Logging, Monitoring, and Tracing.
Provides a high performance and scalable runtime by leveraging open source Envoy as well as Google specific enhancements to work with Cloud Endpoints.
What happens to the current ESP?
ESP continues to be a fully supported part of Cloud Endpoints. There are no short term plans to stop supporting ESP, but longer term we do want ESPv2 to become the standard gateway technology for Cloud Endpoints. Our intention is to make ESPv2 a drop in replacement for ESP that provides fully compatibility with existing Endpoints service configurations. Customers who are already using ESP or thinking about adopting ESP should not feel like they are going down a dead end path or signing up for a significant migration down the road. We expect that any upgrade work to move from ESP to ESPv2 will be limited to replacing nginx-specific configurations with their envoy equivalents and our docs team will provide instructions to make this transition as straightforward as possible.
More details?
Public documentation for Cloud Run and Cloud Functions.