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Istio Proxyless gRPC

Istio Proxyless gRPC is a service integration mode that allows applications to leverage Istio's Service mesh features—such as telemetry and mTLS—without the overhead of the standard Envoy proxy sidecar.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-grpc-echo-readme.md]

Implementation

Instead of routing traffic through an external proxy, the gRPC application itself connects directly to the Istio control plane.^[400-devops__07-Monitoring-and-Observability__k8s-istio__samples__grpc-echo__README.md]

In Kubernetes environments, this is achieved using a custom injection template known as grpc-agent.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-grpc-echo-readme.md] When this template is applied, the istio-proxy sidecar is injected into the application Pod, but its configuration is altered so that it executes only pilot-agent to bootstrap the gRPC connection, rather than running the full Envoy data plane.^[400-devops__07-Monitoring-and-Observability__k8s-istio__samples__grpc-echo__README.md]

  • Istio
  • [[gRPC]]
  • [[Sidecar pattern]]
  • [[xDS API]]

Sources

^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-grpc-echo-readme.md]