[pm90]

My gripe with grpc is that it doesn’t play super well with kubernetes services… you have to take a little bit of care, you need to understand how k8s services work and you have to understand how load balancing in grpc works. Ideally I would want to use protobuf as an interchange format, and a “dumb” http server that understands that.

That being said… once you do configure it properly it can be a powerful tool. The complexity though is usually not worth it unless you’re at a certain scale.

[whs]

I wrote gRPC xDS server for Kubernetes that is configuration-free. Basically just load xDS client library into your code, then use xds:///servicename.namespace (unlike DNS, namespace is always required). It should be as lightweight and scales in similar way to the cluster DNS.

My company run this exact code in production since it was created in 2022. We probably have several times more than 1000 rps gRPC requests running internally including over the public internet for hybrid cloud connectivity. That being said, gRPC's xDS client is not always bugs-free.

https://github.com/wongnai/xds

[DaGardner]

Have you checked out https://connectrpc.com/ We are using this for the basic HTTP server/client compatibility. And that means we can also use from web a context without any proxy setup.

[jeffbee]

If you just want to send a protobuf to a host:port there's no reason you can't do that with gRPC. Client load balancers are something you can optionally layer on top.