Envoy Gateway: Advanced Routes

gRPC and TCP Routes

In the previous article on Envoy gateway, we covered its Helm deployment and how to configure HTTP/HTTPS routes. This article covers how to set up gRPC and TCP routes.

Backends for Routes

Before we start, we deploy a simple gRPC backend server for the gRPC routes and a Postgres database for the TCP routes.

gRPC backend

We deploy a basic echo gRPC server. The following YAML specification deploys the gRPC server and a Kubernetes service for the server.

---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: backend-grpc
  namespace: gateway-testing
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: backend-grpc
      version: v1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: backend-grpc
        version: v1
    spec:
      containers:
        - image: enm10k/grpc-hello-world
          command: ["greeter_server"]
          imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
          name: backend-grpc
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8080
          env:
          - name: PORT
            value: "8080"
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: backend-grpc
  namespace: gateway-testing
  labels:
    app: backend-grpc
spec:
  ports:
    - name: grpc
      port: 50001
      targetPort: 8080
  selector:
    app: backend-grpc
    version: v1

To verify whether this backend is working correctly, we spin up a temporary pod and run some grpcurl…