GRPC Load Balancing With Rancher

1

Will Rancher ever support GRPC load balancing one day? Or in general, are http2 proxies in your feature pipeline? We did our best to see how the built in load balancer might work with GRPC but to no avail. Or have I missed some documentation in which this could theoretically work?

Any help is really appreciated.

2

We ran a few more experiments and have somehow came to the following process:

  • Don’t use the LB at all
  • Press “+1” on the rancher ui to increase containers (across hosts)
  • Container GRPC listens at 0.0.0.0 (all interfaces)
  • Container reports its IP (machine IP) to an external registry (outside of rancher)
  • Container changes its external facing port (in case there is port conflict within same hosts) inside rancher via the Rancher API. This port is given by the external registry who keeps track of port conflicts.
  • We found out that there is a nifty “Edit” button for each container where you can change the external facing port.

Essentially we are creating an LB outside of the rancher environment.

Someone told us we may be able to create the LB inside rancher. Then would we need to know the Rancher API in greater detail to make such internal LB (and thus internal networking) work properly?

Anyone has opinions on this? Appreciate the help!

3

You can always use TCP listeners to balance arbitrary protocols… What exactly do you want the balancer to do beyond that? I’m not really familiar with GRPC but host and path-based routing don’t seem like they’re necessarily terribly relevant…

4

Any progress on this ? Not able to do GRPC lb with rancher 1.6. If rancher ha-proxy lb is upgraded to latest version then we can have build in support.