# The Road to an Envoy Service Mesh

DevFeed: [The Road to an Envoy Service Mesh](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-road-to-an-envoy-service-mesh-27020.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/the-road-to-an-envoy-service-mesh-d1a51cbd31dd?source=rss----3650599ae4e2---4>)

Author: Snow Pettersen

Published: 2019-03-29T15:36:51Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Square Corner Blog - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/square-corner-blog-medium.md>)

Topics: [microservices architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/microservices-architecture.md>), [Architecture & Design](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/architecture-design.md>), [interoperability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/interoperability.md>), [Remote Procedure Call (RPC)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/rpc.md>), [Go Language](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/go-language.md>), [Java](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/java.md>), [Ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ruby.md>), [Ruby on Rails](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ruby-on-rails.md>), [gRPC](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/grpc.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [automatic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automatic.md>), [discovery](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/discovery.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [envoy-proxy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/envoy-proxy.md>), [failover](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/failover.md>), [go](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/go.md>), [http](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/http.md>), [interoperability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/interoperability.md>), [java](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/java.md>), [microservices](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/microservices.md>), [microservices-architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/microservices-architecture.md>), [routing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/routing.md>), [rpc](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rpc.md>), [ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ruby.md>), [service-mesh](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/service-mesh.md>)

## AI overview

Square describes its evolution from a Ruby on Rails monolith to a microservices architecture and explains the interoperability challenges created by its Java, Ruby, and Go stack. The article outlines its Protobuf-based Sake RPC framework, its routing, failover, traffic-shaping, and service-discovery features, and Square's migration toward a full service mesh.

## Source excerpt

Heads up, we've moved! If you'd like to continue keeping up with the latest technical content from Square please visit us at our new home https://developer.squareup.com/blog At Square we've been running a microservices architecture for years, primarily using three different languages: Java, Ruby and Go. Running such a diverse stack can make interoperability between the different languages/frameworks challenging, and in this post I'll talk about how Square has handled this in the past and where we're at today -- actively migrating towards a full service mesh. The Old World Square started off, like many other companies, just running one large monolith. For Square this was a big Ruby on Rails service, that handled everything that Square did. A monolith makes service to service communication completely unnecessary: everything runs in the same code base on a single database, so everything can be implemented without making any outbound network calls (except to third parties outside of Square). After a while, Square decided to move more towards a service oriented architecture to reduce the reliance on a single, large application. To do this Square decided to build their own Protobuf based RPC framework, inspired by Google's Stubby. This was years before gRPC was created, so there weren't any open source options at the time. This RPC framework, called Sake, was implemented for Java and Go as these were the languages used for higher availability services, while regular REST HTTP was used between services that didn't understand Sake. (Incidentally, Sake became a part of gRPC's DNA) Over time this framework became fairly sophisticated, with many features not generally available: Smart retries with automatic failover Prioritized routing based on upstream health Traffic shaping and service discovery This ended up working well, but relied on fat client/server libraries, so extending support to other languages was hard. Attempts were made to bring feature parity between languages i