gRPC-Web and Istio: A Report from Service Mesh Day

In this post I’ll briefly describe the problem in the gRPC domain and a solution based on gRPC-Web, Envoy proxy and Istio to neatly solve it.

What is gRPC?

gRPC is a universal, high-performance, open-source RPC framework based on HTTP/2. Essentially, it lets you easily define a service using Protocol Buffers (Protobufs), works across multiple languages and platforms, and is simple to set up and scale. All this leads to better network performance and flexible API management.

Benefits of gRPC-Web

gRPC-Web addresses a shortcoming in the core gRPC framework. As developers look to benefit from the advantages it confers beyond backend microservices—the fact that it doesn’t work so well with web applications running on browsers. Although most browsers support HTTP/2 and gRPC is based on HTTP/2, gRPC has its own protocols that web applications must understand in order to work properly with it. Web applications do not have this capability because browsers don’t support gRPC out of the box.

One way to get around this problem is to use the gRPC-Web plugin and run a proxy like Envoy along with it. Envoy serves as the default proxy for Istio, and on configuring its gRPC-Web filter, it can transcode HTTP requests/responses Continue reading