Fly Machines vs Envoy Proxy
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Fly Machines and Envoy Proxy.
Quick Verdict
4.8/5
Fly Machines
336 reviews
4.0/5
Envoy Proxy
307 reviews
Fly Machines is rated higher (4.8 vs 4.0). 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 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 Fast-starting VMs for containerised apps at the edge | Envoy Proxy Cloud-native proxy and service mesh sidecar | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.8 (336 reviews)✓ | 4.0 (307 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium | free |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best for | Developers who want fast-starting containers that scale to zero between requests at the edge | Platform engineering teams building service mesh infrastructure on Kubernetes using Istio or similar |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tieropen source |
| Visit Fly Machines → | Visit Envoy Proxy → | |
Fly Machines
Pros
- + 300ms start time
- + Stop when idle — no idle charges
- + Edge locations globally
Cons
- - Fly.io dependency
- - CLI-focused — less visual management
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
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