Envoy is a layer 7 proxy that understands your application and intercepts packets to handle network delivery, allowing developers to focus on business logic. Service meshes like Istio provide a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication, bringing efficiencies and benefits by programming application networking logic in one place. Envoy filters, including the Postgres filter, can be used to collect runtime statistics and metadata from database messages, enabling features such as access control and aggregation of statistics across the fleet of Envoys. YugabyteDB is a distributed SQL database with a Google Spanner-like architecture, offering multiple APIs, including Postgres-compatible YSQL interface, and deployment options like default installation across failure domains or active/DR cluster setup.