Hacker News Reader

Comment by anameaname | Hacker News Reader

Finally! Up until now, when people ask how they are supposed to proxy grpc traffic, we could only recommend Envoy. Pretty much no one wants to hear that they have to change their stack to use new technology. Since a large part of the world is already on nginx, this was a a real barrier for adoption.

Next up, browser support?

View on HN

> Next up, browser support?

Please! There is a working TypeScript client implementation [0] of gRPC-Web [1], which relies on a custom proxy for converting gRPC to gRPC-Web [2]. Would be nice to bring that proxy functionality into Nginx.

[0] https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web/tree/master/ts

[1] https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/PROTOCOL-WEB.md

[2] https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web/tree/master/go/gr...

Caddy Web Server (https://caddyserver.com) have support for gRPC-Web through it's grpc plugin: https://caddyserver.com/docs/http.grpc

Armeria [0] supports pretty much every possible combination of gRPC variants, including gRPC-Web - HTTP/1 and 2, TLS and cleartext, Protobuf and JSON, framed and unframed.

(Disclosure: My team and I wrote it.)

[0] https://line.github.io/armeria

I remember seeing that Nginx has TCP proxying as well. Couldn’t that be an option?

It is, but proxying at the higher-level protocol lets you proxy more intelligently.

For example, how does a TCP proxy perform round-robin load balancing on a per-RPC basis? If it's a gRPC proxy then that capability becomes possible.

My hunch is that the impetus was largely because of this kind of conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com