Envoy Proxy vs Fly Machines
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Envoy Proxy and Fly Machines.
Quick Verdict
4.0/5
Envoy Proxy
307 reviews
4.8/5
Fly Machines
336 reviews
Fly Machines is rated higher (4.8 vs 4.0). Envoy is an open source L7 proxy and service mesh foundation. Used as the data plane in Istio, AWS App Mesh, and Consul Connect. High performance, built for microservices and Kubernetes. Fly Machines are Fly.io's fast-starting virtual machines for containerised workloads. Start in 300ms, stop when idle to save costs. Used for auto-scaling web services and ephemeral compute.
Envoy Proxy Cloud-native proxy and service mesh sidecar | Fly Machines Fast-starting VMs for containerised apps at the edge | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.0 (307 reviews) | 4.8 (336 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | free | freemium |
| Starting price | Free | Free tier available |
| Best for | Platform engineering teams building service mesh infrastructure on Kubernetes using Istio or similar | Developers who want fast-starting containers that scale to zero between requests at the edge |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen source | free tiermanaged optioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit Envoy Proxy → | Visit Fly Machines → | |
Envoy Proxy
Pros
- + Foundation of major service meshes (Istio)
- + High performance C++ implementation
- + Built for Kubernetes microservices
Cons
- - Very complex configuration
- - Not for simple load balancing needs
Fly Machines
Pros
- + 300ms start time
- + Stop when idle — no idle charges
- + Edge locations globally
Cons
- - Fly.io dependency
- - CLI-focused — less visual management
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