>Also: why wouldn't grpc work well with load balancers? It's based on HTTP/2
You answered your own question.
There is always some bit of older infrastructure, like a caching proxy or “enterprise” load balancer that doesn’t quite understand http/2 yet - it is the same reason so much Internet traffic is still on ipv4 when ipv6 exists - the lowest common denominator end up winning for some subsection of traffic.
We use gRPC in our tech stack but some pods handle far more connections than others due to the multiplexing/reuse of existing connections.
Sadly Istio/Envoy solutions are in our backlog for now.
We can't fault gRPC otherwise. It's way faster than if we were to encode/decode json after each microservice hop. It's integrates into golang nicely (another google coolaid solution!) so a win-win there.
You answered your own question.
There is always some bit of older infrastructure, like a caching proxy or “enterprise” load balancer that doesn’t quite understand http/2 yet - it is the same reason so much Internet traffic is still on ipv4 when ipv6 exists - the lowest common denominator end up winning for some subsection of traffic.