gRPC Transcoding With Istio
By SAI SITHARAMAN
There are a lot of advantages to using gRPC instead of HTTP/JSON when building new APIs, like HTTP/2, streaming, cross-language support, server push, etc. The hardest part tends to be legacy services that expect HTTP/JSON. This is why gRPC-JSON transcoding is so attractive: we can implement gRPC servers but expose them to legacy services with a HTTP/JSON interface. Typically, we would use the gRPC Gateway or a product like Google Cloud Endpoints to handle gRPC-JSON transcoding for us, but Envoy implements transcoding too!