How to configure nginx to serve as a load balancer for gRPC?

[alexm...@gmail.com]

I understand that the question is more appropriate for nginx group, but still... Does anyone have a _working_ nginx.conf file that does the job?

I ended up with 404 from nginx sending gRPC requests (yes, valid requests, verified) with the following nginx.conf:

events {

  worker_connections  4096;  ## Default: 1024

}

http {

  upstream ip-10-100-30-92 {

    server ip-10-100-30-147:50101;

    server ip-10-100-130-12:50101;

  }

  server {

    listen 50101;

    server_name ip-10-100-30-92;

    location / {

      proxy_pass http://ip-10-100-30-92;

    }

  }

}

This file produces 404 response and a line in /var/log/nginx/access.log:

192.168.13.238 - - [29/Aug/2017:16:56:34 +0000] "PRI * HTTP/2.0" 400 173 "-" "-"

Actually, I try to use SSL, and a _working_ example of nginx.conf would be _really_ appreciated.

[Osman Ali]

Nginx currently doesn't send http2 to your upstream location. You would be sending http 1.1 after nginx terminates. 

You can use other options:

https://github.com/lyft/envoy

https://nghttp2.org/

[Josh Humphries]

You could use nginx as a TCP load balancer (layer 4), instead of HTTP (layer 7). However, the actual load balancing performance will likely be much worse, especially if clients are using long-lived persistent connections without any sort of client-side load balancing logic (like opening multiple connections and using some scheme, like round-robin, to fan out requests to those connections).

I think there may even be a way to combine TCP load balancing with TLS termination, though I think there was an issue relating to ALPN (used to negotiate http/2 protocol during TLS handshake). Here's a related thread: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/grpc-io/mPcCdVEo-fM/discussion

----
Josh Humphries
jh...@bluegosling.com

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[alexm...@gmail.com]

Thank you both for your replies. I already tried both nghttp2 and envoy w/o success.

I decided to wait a bit, because https://grpc.io/blog/loadbalancing says "Nginx coming soon".

----
Josh Humphries
jh...@bluegosling.com

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