Benchmarking Envoy Proxy, HAProxy, and NGINX Performance on Kubernetes highlights the importance of measuring proxy latency in an elastic environment, which is critical for optimizing the end-user experience. The article explores how increasing amounts of traffic through a proxy introduces latency as it parses requests and routes them to destinations. Unlike throughput, latency cannot be improved by simply scaling out proxies, making it a material impact on business metrics. Three popular open-source L7 proxies - Envoy Proxy, HAProxy, and NGINX - are tested on Kubernetes, showcasing varying performance under different load conditions. The results show that Edge Stack/Envoy Proxy outperforms the others in terms of latency, with Ambassador Edge Stack performing well but not as consistently as Envoy Proxy. The study emphasizes the need for designing a real-world benchmark and test harness for reproducible workloads and encourages feedback from readers to improve performance tuning and scaling efforts.