Running gRPC services for serving legacy RESTful APIs on Kubernetes
summary
Shows how a team migrated internal services to gRPC while keeping the same external REST API by using gRPC JSON transcoding with Envoy/Istio filters and google.api annotations. Describes injecting proto descriptors (files or base64-embedded), compiling protobuf in CI into multi-language libraries, linting breaking changes, publishing Helm charts to ChartMuseum and deploying with Spinnaker. Reports that this serves both gRPC and REST without extra server code, reduces onboarding friction, and notes a production caveat: unmapped routes can return 503 instead of 404.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:17Need for gRPC and REST
- 5:09Envoy transcoding setup
- 8:04Live demo
- 10:04CI/CD pipeline
- 15:30Helm deployment
- 19:03Operational tips
- 21:16Conclusion
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