Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy designed to manage and route network traffic in microservices architectures. It helps improve the performance and security of applications by providing features like load balancing, service discovery, and traffic management. Developed by Lyft, Envoy is often used in conjunction with service mesh technologies, such as Istio, to enhance communication between services. Its ability to handle complex networking tasks makes it a popular choice for organizations adopting cloud-native practices and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.