Requesting comments/opinions on Envoy gRPC compression

[William Zhang]

Hello,

I'd like to introduce Envoy filters similar to the existing HTTP compression and decompression filters specifically for compressing gRPC messages. The use case is to offload compression to sidecars/gateways to reduce link utilization across data centers for RPCs with large message payloads. This offloading can be useful in some languages (we've tried it with C#) where the cost of compression is prohibitively expensive. It is also useful in applying compression uniformly across independent microservices transparently and without code changes. 

I've created a poc here (compression and decompression with some sanity checking of a demo in wireshark to confirm things look reasonable). I was wondering if there was any comments/interest/concerns in such a feature (e.g. I'm unsure what the story of this would be in the proxyless gRPC-xds context).

Thanks,

William Zhang