Envoy Proxy vs Shuttle
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Envoy Proxy and Shuttle.
Quick Verdict
4.2/5
Envoy Proxy
0 reviews
3.4/5
Shuttle
0 reviews
Envoy Proxy is rated higher (4.2 vs 3.4). 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. Shuttle deploys Rust backend services with zero configuration — annotate your code with macros and Shuttle handles the infrastructure. No YAML, no Terraform. Pay-per-use serverless Rust.
Envoy Proxy Cloud-native proxy and service mesh sidecar | Shuttle Deploy Rust backends from your code — no config | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.4 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | free | freemium |
| Starting price | Free | Free tier available |
| Best for | Platform engineering teams on Kubernetes standardising ingress, mesh and egress traffic management on one open data plane, with the in-house or vendor expertise to own a control plane. | Rust developers — solo or small teams — who want a backend live in minutes from annotated code and can accept a London-only region and no contractual uptime guarantee. |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | 0 vCPU |
| RAM | — | 1 GB |
| Storage | — | 1 GB |
| Bandwidth | — | — |
| SLA uptime | — | — |
| Data-center count | — | 1 |
| €/GB RAM/mo | — | €0.00 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | AWS eu-west-2 (London) |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen source | free tieropen sourceus datacenter |
| Visit Envoy Proxy → | Visit Shuttle → | |
Envoy Proxy
Pros
- + Free forever: Apache 2.0, no seats, no per-node licence, no usage metering
- + CNCF graduated with neutral governance and multi-vendor support options
- + xDS APIs are the de facto standard control-plane interface for service meshes and gateways
- + Depth of features: HTTP/3, gRPC-aware load balancing, circuit breaking, external auth, rate limiting, hot cert rotation
- + Documented support window (four minor versions patched) and a decade of production track record
- + Extensive observability hooks: stats, tracing headers, structured access logs
Cons
- - Configuration complexity is high; production-grade setups need a control plane or serious in-house expertise
- - No SLA or commercial support bundled — community support only
- - Sidecar overhead (latency and memory per proxy) is a real cost in large mesh deployments
- - C++ codebase narrows the pool of people who can debug core-level issues
- - Troubleshooting spans both Envoy docs and whatever control plane generates your config
Shuttle
Pros
- + Infrastructure from code annotations: databases, secrets and static assets provisioned from function signatures, no YAML or Terraform
- + Real free tier (0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 0.5 GB database, 100 build minutes/month) with custom domain support
- + Published, itemized usage rates ($0.12/GB storage, $0.025/build minute, $0.10/GB egress) instead of sales-quoted pricing
- + Clear isolation tiering: spot instances on free, reserved VM-isolated instances from Pro
- + First-class Rust framework support (Axum, Actix Web, Rocket, Serenity) and open-source platform code
Cons
- - Rust only — other language stacks are not supported today
- - Single AWS region (London, eu-west-2) with no region choice below the not-yet-available Enterprise tier
- - No published uptime SLA on any current tier; support is Discord-based with 1-business-day response on Pro
- - Steep jump from $20/mo Pro to $250/mo Growth, with metered usage on top of every paid tier
- - Tier contents have changed materially over time (projects and included egress were cut in 2025)
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