> The flip side of community ownership is more politics, more complexity, bureaucratic decisionmaking, and slower evolution. This of course may be true for som

> The flip side of community ownership is more politics, more complexity, bureaucratic decisionmaking, and slower evolution. This of course may be true for some communities, but certainly not the case for L7 proxies. In fact, at the time, the opposite was true: NGINX & HAProxy were content in slowly supporting their (captive) customer bases, with little incentive to innovate. This is why Lyft went off to build Envoy Proxy. At GA, it supported features such as HTTP/2, native observability, hitless reloads — none of which were easy / possible to do in NGINX or HAProxy at the time. > Connection/service proxies are a dime a dozen. I suspect you could have picked nginx, haproxy, or the Linkerd proxy and been just as well off. Linkerd proxy didn’t exist then (there was an early version of it, written in Scala IIRC; the Rust version didn’t come along to quite some time later). I agree that there are many options for service proxies. I’ve found, though, that the Envoy community has been pushing innovation in the space quite aggressively.