A few customers that use AWS App Mesh want a way to ensure that the Virtual Gateway is properly routing, not just up and available. The envoy for the Virtual Gateway provides a health check, but requires in-depth knowledge and observability to determine whether the proxy is successfully routing traffic. Instead, create a simple route to /health or /ping and send it to a known, working service.

There’s a plethora of different options to use for the backend. Some setup a nginx/envoy proxy to respond to packets where others will use a clone of a microservice. Instead, I wrote my own.

Introducing sonobuoy. Written in Go, sonobuoy can be deployed as an agent or a sidecar container and supports TCP, HTTP, and gRPC protocols to provide the cleanest successful response to a request.

Here’s an example, with the TCP listener on port 2869, the HTTP listener on port 2870, and the gRPC listener on port 2871: