Zapier's journey beyond Ingress Nginx

Zapier's transition from ingress-nginx to the Envoy Gateway API was driven by the need to address technical debt and the end-of-life announcement for ingress-nginx, leading to a comprehensive overhaul of their ingress layer. The migration aimed to modernize and streamline traffic routing, leveraging Envoy's proven reliability and scalability. Zapier evaluated several Gateway API implementations before selecting Envoy Gateway for its balance of simplicity, strong API support, and extensibility. The transition involved challenges, including debugging issues related to AWS Network Load Balancer configurations and adapting to Envoy's default behaviors. The migration process was incremental, with rigorous testing and monitoring to ensure a smooth rollout. Key improvements included enhanced observability, developer autonomy, and consistent traffic management, resulting in a unified ingress layer that supports Zapier's scaling and reliability goals. The project exemplified Zapier's engineering culture of collaboration and persistence, leading to a more robust and agile infrastructure.