Observing gRPC-based Microservices on Amazon EKS running Istio
Observing a gRPC-based Kubernetes application using Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus, Grafana, and Kiali on Amazon EKS running Istio service mesh
In the previous two-part post, Kubernetes-based Microservice Observability with Istio Service Mesh, we explored a set of popular open source observability tools easily integrated with the Istio service mesh. The tools included Jaeger and Zipkin for distributed transaction monitoring, Prometheus for metrics collection and alerting, Grafana for metrics querying, visualization, and alerting, and Kiali for overall observability and management of Istio. We rounded out the toolset with the addition of Fluent Bit for log processing and aggregation to Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights. We used these tools to observe a distributed, microservices-based, RESTful application deployed to an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster. The application platform, running on EKS, used Amazon DocumentDB as a persistent data store and Amazon MQ to exchange messages.
In this post, we will examine those same observability tools to monitor an alternate set of Go-based microservices that use Protocol Buffers (aka Protobuf) over gRPC (gRPC Remote Procedure Calls) and HTTP/2 for client-server communications as opposed to the more common RESTful JSON over HTTP. We will learn how Kubernetes, Istio, and the observability tools work seamlessly with gRPC, just as they do with JSON over HTTP on Amazon EKS.
Technologies
gRPC
According to the gRPC project, gRPC is a modern open source high-performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework that can run in any environment. It can efficiently connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking, and authentication. gRPC is also applicable in the last mile of distributed computing to connect devices, mobile applications, and…
