Edge and service proxy Envoy has become the third project to graduate fom the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubation process.

It joins monitoring and alerting toolkit Prometheus, which celebrated its promotion in August 2018, and container orchestrator and CNCF flagship project Kubernetes.

The news arrives 14 months after Envoy was accepted as part of the CNCF – well within the two-year window projects are given to graduate. The new status signals a project’s maturity, quality and stability, and that it’s met requirements laid down by the CNCF.

Under those rules there must be committers from at least two organisations, the project must follow and maintain best practices laid down by the Core Infrastructure initiative, it must have a defined governance and committer process and it must possess a public list of project adopters. If the project then receives a supermajority vote from the technical oversight committee, it is ready to move into the graduation stage.

The goal of CNCF, a sub-foundation of the Linux Foundation, is – to paraphrase – to “create and drive” adoption of modern distributed systems capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self-healing, multi-tenant nodes. Members include AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, Docker, SAP, and VMware.

Envoy was started in 2015 by rideshare company Lyft, with the goal of offering a network abstraction to developers of cloud native applications. It can be used as a service proxy to route requests between services or as an edge proxy to handle external traffic. Besides network routing, Envoy can help with service discovery and load balancing.

Unlike many other CNCF projects that use Go as their language of choice, Envoy is written in C++ – mainly for performance reasons. It is, however, able to form meshes between components written in a couple of different languages, such as Go, Java, PHP and Python.

Lyft in 2016 released Envoy 1.0 as an open-source project. Today, it’s used by – among others – Airbnb, Digital Ocean, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix and VMware, and can be found in important open-source projects like service mesh Istio and cloud application platform Cloud Foundry.

Amazon jumped aboard the Envoy train at re:Invent to introduce AWS App Mesh, a managed control plane for the proxy.

The service mesh is available as a public preview and will help monitoring and controlling the data flow between microservices running on Amazon ECS, EKS, and Kubernetes on ECS.