Next Generation Load Balancing: ALB with gRPC and HTTP/2

Andreas Wittig – 09 Dec 2020

AWS announced an important update for the Application Load Balancer (ALB) in November 2020: Support for gRPC and HTTP/2.

HTTP/2 comes with request multiplexing over a single TCP connection, header compression (HPACK) which reduces network utilization, and a
binary protocol which reduces overhead in parsing data.

gRPC is a high-performance RPC framework with full-duplex streaming. It is designed to connect mircoservices efficiently and uses HTTP/2 under the covers.

Next Generation Load Balancing

This video includes a demo of a gRPC service running behind an ALB.

Andreas Wittig

Andreas Wittig

I’ve been building on AWS since 2012 together with my brother Michael. We are sharing our insights into all things AWS on cloudonaut and have written the book AWS in Action. Besides that, we’re currently working on bucketAV,HyperEnv for GitHub Actions, and marbot.

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