Envoy is a building block of many different solutions from Ingress controllers, Service mesh implementations, as well as functions as a service application frameworks. Any solution utilizing Envoy as its data path component most likely implements Envoy’s xDS API in some way. It is possible to only use a fully static configuration, but typically more complicated deployments incrementally add more complex dynamic configuration via xDS over gRCP. This talk will walk through how the xDS API is defined and what each component does. We’ll discuss lessons learned from Contour, an ingress controller for Kubernetes on how the team implemented xDS (and also struggled with it). Come take a look at how you can build a full Envoy control plane for yourself!