Application Load Balancers enables gRPC workloads with end to end HTTP/2 support

I use https://github.com/jrockway/opinionated-server as the foundation of my server-side apps. I thought about monitoring, tracing, and logging once... and then get it for free in every subsequent project. I explode the app into my cluster, and traces are immediately available in Jaeger, I can read/analyze my logs, and it's all a pleasure to debug. I think everyone should just have their own thing like this, because it's definitely a pain to do it more than once, but a joy once you have it working.

(My thing specifically is missing some things I now need, though, like multiple loggers so you can turn on/off rpc tracing at runtime, support for auto-refreshing TLS certs from a volume mount now that everything is mTLS, etc. Will be added when I am less lazy ;)

While I'm here I'll also plug https://github.com/jrockway/json-logs for making the structured logs enjoyable to read. You can query them with jq, it understands all the popular JSON log formats, and I can't live without it. It's the only client-side app I've ever written that passes the "toothbrush test" -- I use it twice a day, everyday. Recommended ;) (Someday I will write docs and an automated release process.)

I will commend gRPC for being brave enough to attach "RPC" to its name in 2020. Can't say the same for that quisling GraphQL, which is neither what I would call a query language nor has anything to do with graphs. A- for marketing effort, I suppose.

> it enforces no discipline where it counts, state management

A tale as old as time. If your redux app is a bloated confusing mess, then try scaling down your department from 100 devs to the 10 that it actually needs. Most devs are bad at organization. Most devs are just bad in general. Ever see a bad developer grapple with TypeScript? I wager most codebases fall apart from disarray long before they reap any of the presumed benefits of most "best" practices. You can't fix social problems with technology. And code hygiene and state hygiene are fundamentally social issues. People think tools like Prettier can come around and clean their house for them. Like some Roomba for code. Even the best Roomba will smear dog shit all over the place.

[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asn.1)

Also the blog posts on grpc.io are interesting, but I find them harder to discover whilst reading the documentation. But here they are: https://grpc.io/blog/

Grasping the concept of a context/deadlines is quite helpful:

https://grpc.io/blog/deadlines/

You could also find related information in the Google SRE Handbook (Service Level Objectives): https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/service-lev...

If you are familiar with Go, the article about "Context" might also be helpful: https://blog.golang.org/context

But in any case, gRPC is language agnostic and has nothing to do with Go.

To get an idea how to create an api-repository with protobuf defintions to be shared by multiple services/clients, one can look at: https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis

Obviously it's quite natural to just add interceptors as you need them and no doubt there are hundreds of things like this across the Internet.

To some extent, I can't get over how much of a mess you can make by doing things like this. Because generated service definitions have a fixed schema (func (s Service) Method(context.Context, Request) (Reply, error)), you have to resort to hacks like propagating the current user through the context, instead of the easy-to-read and easy-to-test alternative of just passing in the parameters explicitly, as in func (s Service) Method(context.Context, types.Session, Request) (Reply, error). If I was going to spend time on infrastructure, that's the thing I'd fix first.

Some other frameworks do a little better here. We use GraphQL at work, and the methods are typically of the pattern:

    func AutogeneratedMethod(context.Context, ...) {
       foo := MustGetFoo(ctx)
       bar := MustGetBar(ctx)
       return ActualThingThatDoesTheWork(ctx, foo, bar, ...)
    }