Running Envoy Gateway locally

Overview

Today, Envoy Gateway runs only on Kubernetes. This is an ideal solution when the applications are running in Kubernetes. However there might be cases when the applications are running on the host which would require Envoy Gateway to run locally.

Goals

• Define an API to allow Envoy Gateway to retrieve configuration while running locally.
• Define an API to allow Envoy Gateway to deploy the managed Envoy Proxy fleet on the host machine.

Non Goals

• Support multiple ways to retrieve configuration while running locally.
• Support multiple ways to deploy the Envoy Proxy fleet locally on the host.

API

• The provider field within the EnvoyGateway configuration only supports Kubernetes today which provides two features - the ability to retrieve resources from the Kubernetes API Server as well as deploy the managed Envoy Proxy fleet on Kubernetes.
• This document proposes adding a new top level provider type called Custom with two fields called resource and infrastructure to allow the user to configure the sub providers for providing resource configuration and an infrastructure to deploy the Envoy Proxy data plane in.
• A File resource provider will be introduced to enable retrieving configuration locally by reading from the configuration from a file.
• A Host infrastructure provider will be introduced to allow Envoy Gateway to spawn a Envoy Proxy child process on the host.

Here is an example configuration

provider:
  type: Custom
  custom:
    resource:
      type: File
      file:
        paths: 
        - "config.yaml"
    infrastructure:
      type: Host
      host: {}