Standalone Deployment Mode

Envoy Gateway also supports running in standalone mode. In this mode, Envoy Gateway does not need to rely on Kubernetes and can be deployed directly on bare metal or virtual machines.

Currently, Envoy Gateway only support the file provider and the host infrastructure provider combinations.

• The file provider will configure the Envoy Gateway to get all gateway-api resources from file system.
• The host infrastructure provider will configure the Envoy Gateway to deploy one Envoy Proxy as a host process.

Quick Start

In this quick-start, we will run Envoy Gateway in standalone mode with the file provider and the host infrastructure provider.

Prerequisites

Create a local directory just for testing:

mkdir -p /tmp/envoy-gateway-test

As we do not provide the Envoy Gateway binary in latest release, you can compile this binary on your own from project by using command:

make build

The compiled binary lies in bin/{os}/{arch}/envoy-gateway.

Create Certificates

All runners in Envoy Gateway are using TLS connection, so create these TLS certificates locally to ensure the Envoy Gateway works properly.

envoy-gateway certgen --local

Start Envoy Gateway

Start Envoy Gateway by the following command:

envoy-gateway server --config-path standalone.yaml

with standalone.yaml configuration:

apiVersion: gateway.envoyproxy.io/v1alpha1
kind: EnvoyGateway
gateway:
  controllerName: gateway.envoyproxy.io/gatewayclass-controller
provider:
  type: Custom
  custom:
    resource:
      type: File
      file:
        paths: ["/tmp/envoy-gateway-test"]
    infrastructure:
      type: Host
      host: {}
logging:
  level:
    default: info
extensionApis:
  enableBackend: true

As you can see, we have enabled the Backend API, this API will be used to represent our local endpoints.

Trigger an Update

Any changes under watched paths will be considered as an update by the file provider.

For instance, copying example file into /tmp/envoy-gateway-test/ will trigger an update of gateway-api resources:

cp examples/standalone/quickstart.yaml /tmp/envoy-gateway-test/quickstart.yaml

From the Envoy Gateway log, you should be able to observe that the Envoy Proxy has been started, and its admin address has been returned.

Test Connection

Starts a simple local server as an endpoint:

python3 -m http.server 3000

Curl the example server through Envoy Proxy:

curl --verbose --header "Host: www.example.com" http://0.0.0.0:8888/

*   Trying 0.0.0.0:8888...
* Connected to 0.0.0.0 (127.0.0.1) port 8888 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.example.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.81.0
> Accept: */*
>
* Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< server: SimpleHTTP/0.6 Python/3.10.12
< date: Sat, 26 Oct 2024 13:20:34 GMT
< content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
< content-length: 1870
<
...
* Connection #0 to host 0.0.0.0 left intact