EnvoyCon 2020

Performance of remote procedure calls between services depend on a lot of factors, but when you start doing RPCs over a high latency network and/or using TLS (so when you have to perform RPCs across different datacenters, for example), the cost of establishing a connection is very steep. This is particularly problematic for environment which don't support persistent connection pools - one notable example being the PHP language, that we use to run MediaWiki. This talk will go through how Wikimedia introduced envoy in its mixed on-prem/kubernetes environment, and how that allowed to improve the performance, reliability and observability of its stack. Particular focus will be put on: the performance effects for our PHP applications running at scale, the operational problems adopting envoy allowed solving, and the challenges introduced by moving to use it.