How does this compare to, say, gRPC? One of the ideas in the gRPC space is that the protocol, at the client and server level, is always plain HTTP/2 and DNS. T

How does this compare to, say, gRPC? One of the ideas in the gRPC space is that the protocol, at the client and server level, is always plain HTTP/2 and DNS. To do discovery (that is, find the IP of a peer), load balancing, routing, retrying, throttling, circuit-breaking etc. you inject a proxy such as Istio [1] in the middle that modifies the connection with all the necessary intelligence. This way, the app stays super simple -- it needs no configuration. If it wants to talk a service called "foo", it just naively dials http://foo/ http://foo/ and does gRPC. If you write lots of apps in different languages, they only need the gRPC client/server glue, nothing else. [1] https://istio.io/ https://istio.io/