Advanced load balancing. Though nginx plus (the paid server) supports some advanced load balancing features such as out of band health checking, even that version does not have the advanced service discovery and asynchronous DNS resolution features that Envoy does." NGINX has an asynchronous DNS resolver, and NGINX Plus uses this in a range of service discovery scenarios: Background: https://www.nginx.com/products/on-the-fly-reconfiguration/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/microservices-reference-architecture-part-3the-fabricmodel/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/dns-service-discovery-nginx-plus/ Consul implementation: https://www.nginx.com/blog/service-discovery-with-nginx-plus-and-consul/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/service-discovery-nginx-plus-srv-records-consul-dns/ etcd implementation: https://www.nginx.com/blog/service-discovery-nginx-plus-etcd/ Zookeeper implementation: https://www.nginx.com/blog/service-discovery-nginx-plus-zookeeper/ I've just stumbled across envoy, and it looks very impressive. I'm very happy to help explain further or collaborate on this project if appropriate. Please reach out to owen@nginx.com - thank you

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