With the newest edition of the gRPC protocol, microservices-based systems will no longer need separate stand-alone service mesh sidecars, noted Megan Yahya, Google’s product manager for gRPC, in her talk at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU earlier this month. By Joab Jackson.
Instead, for those already using gRPC, they can extend the service directly to the control plane, and have it take over the work formerly done through proxy services, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Envoy, one of the most popular sidecar proxies in use today.
Recent editions of gRPC come with the ability to process requests directly from the control plane, eliminating the need for sidecar proxies, Yahya pointed out. It can support a range of service mesh duties, including load balancing and service discovery. This is done thanks to its use of the XDS data plane APIs, first developed by the Envoy team.
Out of the box, it works well with Google Cloud’s Traffic Director service mesh and has experimental (no documentation) support of Istio, Google’s own open source control plane software. Check the link to presentation on youtube in the article. Nice one!
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