Context & Background

Background

I wanted to increase reliability of my swarm setup by making it easier to replicate key parts of the infrastructure in case of a node failure. As most of my workloads are HTTP services for several domains, I figured that replicating the proxy should prevent it from becoming a single point of failure. The challenge was moving the state out of the proxy. That state being things route & network configuration, TLS certificates, and the LetsEncrypt tokens used to issue those certificates.

Envoy offers a wide range of configuration options via an API that seemed like a good fit for the job.

Why not use x?

Building this gave me a chance to learn about mesh networks, LetsEncrypt, gRPC, envoy and more about Docker Swarm. Instead of delegating most of the work to CNCF products on something like Kubernetes I used this chance to keep things simple (thus opinionated) and cheap for the pet projects that I'm running.

That being said (written), you can view this project as the simplest tool to get virtual hosting on your swarm.