Web applications have evolved from monoliths to microservices leveraging architectural styles like REST APIs, WebSockets, etc. for communication. gRPC provides benefits like optimization, type safety, etc. over traditional JSON-based protocols. Given gRPC’s support for a vast number of languages, backend services can easily reap these benefits by leveraging gRPC. Browsers, however, don’t yet support gRPC, making it difficult for Web UIs from taking advantage of this protocol.
By introducing a Service Mesh into the mix, a lot can be changed. Web UIs can now talk to a Service Mesh like Istio via gRPC-Web, while the Istio proxy (Envoy) does the transcoding into gRPC. You also gain a whole lot of features like Observability, Service Discovery, etc. by using a Service Mesh. By switching over to this new gRPC-Web and Istio paradigm, developing a Cloud-Native application becomes a seamless experience. Join Venil Noronha in this presentation to learn to do this yourself!