gRPC Load Balancing on Kubernetes without Tears

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Many new gRPC users are surprised to find that Kubernetes’s default load balancing often doesn’t work out of the box with gRPC. For example, here’s what happens when you take a simple gRPC Node.js microservices app and deploy it on Kubernetes:

While the voting service displayed here has several pods, it’s clear from Kubernetes’s CPU graphs that only one of the pods is actually doing any work—because only one of the pods is receiving any traffic. Why?

In this blog post, we describe why this happens, and how you can easily fix it by adding gRPC load balancing to any Kubernetes app with Linkerd, a CNCF service mesh and service sidecar.

Read more at Kubernetes Blog