Matt Klein’s Twitter feed lists his title as “Plumber,” a commentary on how the software engineer at Lyft Inc. views his current workload as a maintainer for one of the most popular open-source tools on the planet.

Klein (pictured) is the creator of Envoy, an open-source edge and service proxy for cloud-native applications. It was developed by the software engineer for Lyft in 2015 to bridge the gap between multiple application frameworks and code languages and was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2017. It has become widely adopted, and Klein now spends much of his time keeping the Envoy plumbing running smoothly.

“Much to my amazement, Envoy is now pervasive; it’s used everywhere around the world,” Klein said. “When I open all of these apps on my phone, 80% or 90% of them are going through Envoy in some form. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that it would be so widely used.”

Klein spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the latest Envoy update and emerging open-source tools for developers.

Onboarding Envoy users

In June, the edge proxy was updated with the addition of Envoy Gateway, designed to improve accessibility for API platforms that want to be compatible with cloud-native tools such as service meshes and Kubernetes.

“The goal of Envoy Gateway is to make it easier for people to run Envoy within Kubernetes as an ingress controller,” Klein said. “We want to provide Envoy Gateway as a way of onboarding more users into the Envoy ecosystem and making Envoy the default API gateway or edge proxy within Kubernetes.”

Envoy followed the path of being developed within a company to fix a specific business problem and became widely adopted by others through the open-source ecosystem. One of the CNCF projects in the incubating stage that could follow a similar playbook is Backstage, an open platform for building developer portals that was created at Spotify Inc.

“I think Backstage out of Spotify is absolutely fantastic,” Klein said. “That’s an area in terms of developer portals and developer efficiency that has been very underserved.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022 event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE