How Proxyless gRPC Works in a Service Mesh - Kannan Jayaprakasam & MV Shiva Prasad, Google

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23-26 March, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io How Proxyless gRPC Works in a Service Mesh - Kannan Jayaprakasam & MV Shiva Prasad, Google In today's dynamic, cloud-native environments, microservices are constantly scaling and updating in a distributed deployment with redundancy. How does a gRPC client keep up without relying on static, hardcoded IP addresses? The answer lies in gRPC implementing the xDS protocol that service meshes use to configure the behavior of data plane by pushing updates for service discovery, load balancing and service routing. gRPC implements this via: A NameResolver for xDS A watch based mechanism for receiving config resources from the Control Plane for routing rules, load balancing policies, and the health statuses of backend endpoints. Load balancing policies that use the resource updates and config for implementing the load balancing, allowing the client to intelligently route traffic, react to failures, and participate in advanced traffic management schemes like canary deployments, all without requiring a restart or code change.