At Weaveworks we use gRPC extensively within Weave Cloud. In this talk I discuss 5 of the stages we went through as we adopted gRPC, some of the problems we encountered and technologies we used to overcome them

1. @ Weaveworks
Tom Wilkie, 14/03/2017
Weave Online Users Group

2. Who Am I?
• Director Software Engineering
at Weaveworks
• Home brewer
Previously:
• SRE for Google Analytics
• Founder/CTO at Acunu
• Engineer at XenSource
@tom_wilkie
https://github.com/tomwilkie

3. Work on https://cloud.weave.works, our service for
exploring, deploying and monitoring Micro Services…

4. 1. gRPC for Prometheus
Retriever
scraping
your jobs
Your DC
Weave Cloud
Frontend,
Authenticator
Distributor
Ingester
Distributor…
IngesterIngester
DynamoDB S3
http://goo.gl/qsJlrQ
gRPC?

5. 1. gRPC for Prometheus
Prometheus AWS ELB Nginx Cortex
weavecortex

6. 2. gRPC intra service
Weave Cloud
Frontend,
Authenticator
Distributor
Ingester
Distributor…
IngesterIngester
DynamoDB S3
gRPC?
gRPC?
gRPC?

7. 3. gRPC monitoring
https://github.com/weaveworks/common/blob/master/middleware/
grpc_instrumentation.go

8. 3. gRPC monitoring

9. 4. HTTP over gRPC
https://www.weave.works/turtles-way-http-grpc/
https://github.com/weaveworks/common/tree/master/httpgrpc
Frontend
Backend
weavecortex
Client
HTTP
gRPC
- Frontend parses HTTP request
- Sends generic gRPC request
- Backend turns it back in HTTP

10. 4. HTTP over gRPC

11. 5. gRPC Streaming
• Cortex rolling upgrades
• Flush all data to S3
• Took >10mins per instance

12. 5. gRPC Streaming
New system uses gRPC streaming to send data to other
ingester.
Now takes ~14s per instance.
leaving
instance
weavecortex
joining
instance
weavecortex
gRPC stream

13. 1. gRPC for Prometheus
2. gRPC from Weave Cloud
3. gRPC monitoring
4. HTTP over gRPC
5. gRPC streaming

14. We’re hiring!
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