Easegress: Cloud-Native Traffic Orchestration Proxy

Introduction

Traffic control tends to start simple—“route requests to the service”—and quickly becomes a reliability and delivery problem: retries, circuit breakers, canaries, and the need to see what’s happening when things degrade.

Easegress, accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project in 2024, is a cloud-native proxy focused on high availability and performance for traffic orchestration. With observability, extensibility, and integration in mind, it fits teams that want strong traffic management without turning every application into a bespoke networking project.

Traffic Orchestration

• Load balancing provides sophisticated load balancing capabilities.
• Traffic routing enables flexible traffic routing rules.
• Traffic splitting enables canary and blue-green deployments.
• Circuit breaking provides resilience during service failures.

High Availability

1. Fault tolerance provides resilience to failures.
2. Health checking enables automatic health checking of backends.
3. Failover capabilities enable automatic failover during failures.
4. Replication support enables high availability deployments.

Observability

• Metrics collection provides comprehensive metrics for traffic analysis.
• Logging enables detailed logging of traffic operations.
• Tracing support enables distributed tracing of requests.
• Dashboard integration provides visualization of traffic metrics.

Extensibility

• Plugin support enables extension through plugins.
• Custom filters enable creation of custom traffic filters.
• API integration enables integration with external systems.
• Scripting support enables custom traffic processing logic.

Use Cases

• API gateway enables API gateway capabilities.
• Service mesh provides service mesh capabilities.
• Load balancing provides advanced load balancing.
• Traffic management enables sophisticated traffic management.

Practical notes (choosing where it sits in your stack)

• Ingress vs proxy vs mesh: be clear whether you need edge ingress, internal service-to-service control, or both—this drives deployment and operational ownership.
• Failure behavior: features like traffic splitting and circuit breaking are most valuable when you define expected outcomes (timeouts, retries, fallback) ahead of incidents.
• Telemetry first: treat metrics/logs/tracing as part of the design, otherwise “smart routing” can become hard to debug under load.

Summary

Easegress represents a significant advancement in cloud-native traffic orchestration, providing teams with powerful capabilities for managing traffic in cloud-native environments.