gRPC HTTP/1.1 bridge

• gRPC architecture overview
• v1 API reference
• v2 API reference

This is a simple filter which enables the bridging of an HTTP/1.1 client which does not support response trailers to a compliant gRPC server. It works by doing the following:

• When a request is sent, the filter sees if the connection is HTTP/1.1 and the request content type is application/grpc.
• If so, when the response is received, the filter buffers it and waits for trailers and then checks the grpc-status code. If it is not zero, the filter switches the HTTP response code to 503. It also copies the grpc-status and grpc-message trailers into the response headers so that the client can look at them if it wishes.
• The client should send HTTP/1.1 requests that translate to the following pseudo headers:
  • :method: POST
  • :path:
  • content-type: application/grpc
• The body should be the serialized grpc body which is:
  • 1 byte of zero (not compressed).
  • network order 4 bytes of proto message length.
  • serialized proto message.
• Because this scheme must buffer the response to look for the grpc-status trailer it will only work with unary gRPC APIs.

This filter also collects stats for all gRPC requests that transit, even if those requests are normal gRPC requests over HTTP/2.

More info: wire format in gRPC over HTTP/2.

Statistics

The filter emits statistics in the cluster..grpc. namespace.