EnvoyCon 2018

Yelp has been working with service meshes since the introduction of SmartStack in 2014. After reaching the limits of the SmartStack featureset, we were eager to upgrade to Envoy. With years of experience operating a service mesh at scale, we figured that the migration would be a walk in the park… It turns out the park is larger than we thought.

In this session, we’ll discuss our experience migrating Yelp’s hundreds of services to using Envoy, the migration challenges we faced, and the solutions that we’ve come up with including:

* Transparently moving clients between SmartStack and Envoy using client library feature toggles
* Transforming Envoy’s grpc access log messages to HAProxy-formatted syslog messages in order to harness our existing log processing pipeline
* Using docker-based acceptance testing to confidently push control plane changes directly to production
* How to avoid DDOSing yourself with Envoy’s health checks