Which component is commonly used as a lightweight proxy for inter-service traffic in Kubernetes?

• A. Nginx
• B. Envoy
• C. HAProxy
• D. Traefik

Answer: (B)

Envoy is designed as a lightweight, high-performance proxy that fits neatly into a Kubernetes service mesh as the data plane. In practice, service meshes like Istio inject Envoy sidecar proxies alongside each application instance, allowing every inter-service call to be intercepted, observed, and controlled without changing application code. Envoy handles the fast, east-west traffic between microservices with dynamic configuration, strong load balancing, retries, circuit breaking, and rich metrics, making it ideal for inter-service communication in Kubernetes.

The other proxies listed can function in Kubernetes but are more commonly used as ingress gateways or general-purpose proxies rather than the standard, mesh-ready data plane for service-to-service traffic. Envoy’s mesh-oriented design and ecosystem support explain why it’s the commonly used choice.