gRPC Conf 2020

gRPC works perfectly for service-to-service communication in private networks, where a client talks to a server via a direct TCP connection. Things are more complicated if services, users, or CLI tools talk to gRPC servers exposed on the internet, as many of the commonly used application-level load balancers/reverse proxies only support gRPC with additional configuration (e.g., nginx) or not at all (e.g., AWS ELB).
In this session, an approach for communicating with gRPC services through reverse proxies that only support HTTP/1.1 is presented. While the approach comes with some restrictions, it requires next to no changes to both the client and server code, no additional components to be deployed, and ensures maximum compatibility between different client and server setups. Along with the approach, a Go library implementing it will be introduced, demonstrating via code examples and a live demo how this technique can be used as a drop-in replacement in existing Go-based gRPC code.