I'm building a gateway for microservices with retries and circuit breaking, what do people use?

People usually pick one of a few patterns/tools depending on whether they want a full API gateway or just resilience in front of services:

Common choices

1) Envoy

• Very popular as a service proxy / gateway
• Supports:
  • retries
  • timeouts
  • circuit breaking
  • load balancing
  • mTLS
• Often used with service mesh setups like Istio or Consul
• Good if you want strong traffic control at the edge or between services

2) Kong

• API gateway focused
• Supports plugins for:
  • retries
  • rate limiting
  • auth
  • logging
  • circuit breaking via integrations/plugins depending on setup
• Good if you want an API management layer

3) NGINX / NGINX Plus

• Common reverse proxy / gateway
• Can do retries, timeouts, load balancing
• Circuit breaking is usually more manual / indirect compared with Envoy
• Simple and widely known

4) Spring Cloud Gateway / Spring Cloud Circuit Breaker

• Common in Java/Spring ecosystems
• Uses libraries like:
  • Resilience4j
  • Netflix Hystrix was common historically, but is deprecated
• Good if your gateway is part of a Spring app

5) Resilience4j

• Not a gateway itself, but a popular circuit breaker/retry library
• Used inside app code or gateway code
• Supports:
  • circuit breaker
  • retry
  • bulkhead
  • rate limiter
• Good when you want app-level resilience, not just proxy-level

6) Istio / Linkerd

• Service mesh rather than gateway
• Great for:
  • retries
  • circuit breaking
  • traffic shaping
  • observability
• Usually paired with Envoy under the hood
• Better for service-to-service traffic than edge gateway use

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Rule of thumb

• API gateway at the edge: Kong, NGINX, Spring Cloud Gateway
• Service-to-service resilience: Envoy, Istio, Linkerd
• In-app resilience: Resilience4j

If you tell me your stack — for example Java/Spring, Kubernetes, Node.js, or Go — I can recommend the most common setup for that environment.