gRPC bridge

Requirements

Sandbox environment

Setup your sandbox environment with Docker and Docker Compose, and clone the Envoy repository with Git.

The gRPC bridge sandbox is an example usage of Envoy’s gRPC bridge filter.

This is an example of a key-value store where an http-based client CLI, written in Python, updates a remote store, written in Go, using the stubs generated for both languages.

The client send messages through a proxy that upgrades the HTTP requests from http/1.1 to http/2 or http/3

[client](http/1.1) -> [client-egress-proxy](http/2) -> [server-ingress-proxy](http/2) -> [server]

Another Envoy feature demonstrated in this example is Envoy’s ability to do authority base routing via its route configuration.

Step 1: Generate the protocol stubs

Change to the examples/grpc-bridge directory.

A docker-compose file is provided that generates the stubs for both client and server from the specification in the protos directory.

Inspecting the docker-compose-protos.yaml file, you will see that it contains both the python and go gRPC protoc commands necessary for generating the protocol stubs.

Generate the stubs as follows:

  1. $ pwd
  2. envoy/examples/grpc-bridge
  3. $ docker-compose -f docker-compose-protos.yaml up
  4. Starting grpc-bridge_stubs_python_1 ... done
  5. Starting grpc-bridge_stubs_go_1     ... done
  6. Attaching to grpc-bridge_stubs_go_1, grpc-bridge_stubs_python_1
  7. grpc-bridge_stubs_go_1 exited with code 0
  8. grpc-bridge_stubs_python_1 exited with code 0

You may wish to clean up left over containers with the following command:

  1. $ docker container prune

You can view the generated kv modules for both the client and server in their respective directories:

  1. $ ls -la client/kv/kv_pb2.py
  2. -rw-r--r--  1 mdesales  CORP\Domain Users  9527 Nov  6 21:59 client/kv/kv_pb2.py
  4. $ ls -la server/kv/kv.pb.go
  5. -rw-r--r--  1 mdesales  CORP\Domain Users  9994 Nov  6 21:59 server/kv/kv.pb.go

These generated python and go stubs can be included as external modules.

Step 2: Start all of our containers

To build this sandbox example and start the example services, run the following commands:

  1. $ pwd
  2. envoy/examples/grpc-bridge
  3. $ docker-compose pull
  4. $ docker-compose up --build -d
  5. $ docker-compose ps
  7.                Name                             Command               State                  Ports
  8. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  9. grpc-bridge_grpc-client-proxy_1        /docker-entrypoint.sh /bin ... Up      10000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9911->9911/tcp
  10. grpc-bridge_grpc-client_1              /bin/sh -c tail -f /dev/null   Up
  11. grpc-bridge_grpc-server-proxy_1        /docker-entrypoint.sh /bin ... Up      10000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8811->8811/tcp
  12. grpc-bridge_grpc-server_1              /bin/sh -c /bin/server         Up      0.0.0.0:8081->8081/tcp

Step 3: Send requests to the Key/Value store

To use the Python service and send gRPC requests:

  1. $ pwd
  2. envoy/examples/grpc-bridge

Set a key:

  1. $ docker-compose exec grpc-client python /client/grpc-kv-client.py set foo bar
  2. setf foo to bar

Get a key:

  1. $ docker-compose exec grpc-client python /client/grpc-kv-client.py get foo
  2. bar

Modify an existing key:

  1. $ docker-compose exec grpc-client python /client/grpc-kv-client.py set foo baz
  2. setf foo to baz

Get the modified key:

  1. $ docker-compose exec grpc-client python /client/grpc-kv-client.py get foo
  2. baz

In the running docker-compose container, you should see the gRPC service printing a record of its activity:

  1. $ docker-compose logs grpc-server
  2. grpc_1    | 2017/05/30 12:05:09 set: foo = bar
  3. grpc_1    | 2017/05/30 12:05:12 get: foo
  4. grpc_1    | 2017/05/30 12:05:18 set: foo = baz

See also

gRPC bridge filter.

Learn more about configuring Envoy’s gRPC bridge filter.