How we migrated Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

This post details the migration of Dropbox's traffic infrastructure from Nginx to Envoy. It highlights the limitations of the legacy Nginx setup, including its static configuration, reliance on Lua for dynamic logic, and operational maintenance costs. The post compares Nginx and Envoy across performance, observability, and configuration dimensions, concluding that Envoy offers better performance, especially with stats collection, and a more modern, flexible configuration model. The migration to Envoy enabled significant server cost savings and improved handling of gRPC and other modern protocols.