gRPC bridge

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:

$ pwd
envoy/examples/grpc-bridge
$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-protos.yaml up
Starting grpc-bridge_stubs_python_1 ... done
Starting grpc-bridge_stubs_go_1     ... done
Attaching to grpc-bridge_stubs_go_1, grpc-bridge_stubs_python_1
grpc-bridge_stubs_go_1 exited with code 0
grpc-bridge_stubs_python_1 exited with code 0

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

$ docker container prune

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

$ ls -la client/kv/kv_pb2.py
-rw-r--r--  1 mdesales  CORP\Domain Users  9527 Nov  6 21:59 client/kv/kv_pb2.py

$ ls -la server/kv/kv.pb.go
-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:

$ pwd
envoy/examples/grpc-bridge
$ docker-compose pull
$ docker-compose up --build -d
$ docker-compose ps

               Name                             Command               State                  Ports
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
grpc-bridge_grpc-client-proxy_1        /docker-entrypoint.sh /bin ... Up      10000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9911->9911/tcp
grpc-bridge_grpc-client_1              /bin/sh -c tail -f /dev/null   Up
grpc-bridge_grpc-server-proxy_1        /docker-entrypoint.sh /bin ... Up      10000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8811->8811/tcp
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:

$ pwd
envoy/examples/grpc-bridge

Set a key:

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

Get a key:

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

Modify an existing key:

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

Get the modified key:

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

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

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