Implementing gRPCweb with Istio Envoy

June 10, 2019

This is a post which was about how web applications can benefit from gRPC by leveraging a gRPC sub-project called gRPC-Web along with Istio.

gRPC-Web addresses a shortcoming in the core gRPC framework: the fact that it doesn’t work so well with web applications running on browsers. That’s because even though most browsers support HTTP/2 and gRPC is based on HTTP/2, gRPC has its own protocols that web applications must understand in order to work properly with it. But web applications do not have this capability because browsers don’t support gRPC out of the box. Developers are increasingly looking to benefit from the advantages the core gRPC framework confers beyond backend microservices, thus gRPC-Web was born.