proxyless gRPC in kubernetes with istio service mesh POC

This PoC aims to enable load balancing of gRPC services in kubernetes using istio without proxying the requests, but instead leverage the xDS support.

The main benefits of using proxyless load balancing is:

• Lower latency
• Less resources necessary per service in the mesh

Prerequisites

• kind
• istioctl
• kubectl

Setup

Create kind cluster and install istio

git clone https://github.com/UnAfraid/proxyless
cd kubernetes/cluster
./install.sh

Install proxyless client and server PoC

cd ../workload
./install.sh

Inspect

Make sure all pods are running

kubectl --context kind-proxyless-poc -n proxyless get pods

Inspect logs of the client

kubectl --context kind-proxyless-poc -n proxyless logs -l app.kubernetes.io/name=proxyless-client

Inspect logs of the server

kubectl --context kind-proxyless-poc -n proxyless logs -l app.kubernetes.io/name=proxyless-server

Relevant links:

• https://cloud.google.com/service-mesh/docs/service-routing/proxyless-overview
• https://istio.io/latest/blog/2021/proxyless-grpc/
• https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/tree/master/examples/features/xds
• https://events.istio.io/istiocon-2022/sessions/proxyless-grpc/