Is it possible to run both Istio and gRPC in a GKE cluster

Question

Istio and gRPC seem complementary and I'd like to use both in the clusters.

The thing is that they both add an extra container which receives/proxy communication between pods / microservices.

Is it advised or not to use both in parallel in all pods?

Are there particular adaptations to do if one uses both?

Answer 1

Istio and gRPC do work well together, when declaring your services ports' to istio just make sure to name them grpc-something so the proxy knows it is h2/grpc traffic and route it properly

You mention that gRPC adds an extra container - why not having your service speak gRPC natively ?

We do have future plans with protocol transcoding and rich integrated gRPC/istio libraries that would skip layers but that's not there yet.