IANA port allocation question

[Eliot Lear]

Dear gRPC maintainers,

Please forgive me if this has been well covered.

As an IANA TCP/UDP port reviewer, I would like to know what you think best practices ought to be for gRPC.  Our job is to ensure that TCP and UDP ports are allocated efficiently.  That is- individual applications should receive no more than one port, and may in fact receive NO port if they can mux off of another service.  The general tradeoff we are asked to make is in favor of saving ports over whatever complexity that might entail regarding muxing.

As a gRPC (extreme) novice, I see two separate opportunities to mux: the first is at the H2/H3 layer, and the second is at the gRPC topic layer.  The H2 level has other attractions that one might consider- there is the opportunity to simplify certificate management at the gRPC layer.  That is- certs are managed in fewer points.  OTOH, I could envision this being at least modestly problematic if two or more apps are running.  Dispatch really has to work.

What is your advice to port reviewers?  I expect this general topic to be discussed at the IETF in March.

Thanks in advance.

Eliot Lear