Cloudflare's Anycast network spans 310 PoPs (May 2025) delivering static assets, WAF, DDoS mitigation, and Zero‑Trust tunnelling while providing analytics and rate limiting at the edge.
Workers run V8 isolates in under 5 ms cold‑start across Cloudflare's global edge. The 2025 Smart Placement feature pushes compute closer to origin latency zones, and AI Gateway allows streamed inference with on‑PoP caching.
Fastly's Compute@Edge executes WebAssembly modules with <50 ms cold‑start, supports KV & object storage, and offers real‑time logging, shielding, and advanced TLS cert automation.
NGINX Ingress Controller 3.1 (Mar 2025) adds Gateway API Gamma, dynamic mTLS rotation, and enhanced Prometheus metrics, acting as a high‑performance L7 load‑balancer for Kubernetes clusters.
Envoy 1.33 (Feb 2025) stabilizes WASM filters, enables HTTP/3 HCM, and introduces adaptive concurrency controls, serving as the core data plane for meshes like Istio and Consul.
Istio 1.23 (Apr 2025) finalizes ambient sidecar‑less dataplane, halves resource footprint, and integrates Kubernetes Gateway API for unified ingress and east‑west traffic management with mTLS.
Cilium 1.16 (Feb 2025) replaces kube‑proxy via eBPF, offers L7 Kafka policies, and graduates Mesh mode with Envoy‑free Hubble observability for high‑performance networking.
Consul 1.18 (Jan 2025) enhances Mesh Gateway federation, embeds wasm‑based traffic filters, and supports xDS sync, enabling zero‑trust service‑to‑service connectivity across multi‑cluster and multi‑cloud environments.
cloudflared 2025.4 adds QUIC multiplex transport, automatic token refresh, and Kubernetes sidecar mode, creating outbound Zero‑Trust tunnels that expose services without public ingress IPs.
