grpc doesn't really do anything special on top of http/2. Load balancers that are aware of http/2 on both sides shouldn't have any trouble with either. The pr

grpc doesn't really do anything special on top of http/2. Load balancers that are aware of http/2 on both sides shouldn't have any trouble with either. The problem that people run into load balancing grpc is that they try to use a layer 4 load balancer to balance layer 7 requests; that is, if there are 4 backends, the load balancer tells you the address of one of them, and then you wonder why the other 3 backends don't get 25% of the traffic. That's because grpc uses 1 TCP connection and it sends multiple requests over that connection ("channel"). If your load balancer tells you the addresses of all 4 servers, then you can open up 4 channels and load balance inside your application (this was always the preferred approach at google, with a control channel to gracefully drain certain backends, etc.). If your load balancer is aware of http/2 at the protocol level (layer 7), then you open up one channel to your load balancer, which already has one channel for each backend. When a request arrives, it inspects it and picks a backend and proxies the rest of the exchange. Ordinary http/2 works like this, it's just that you can get away with a network load balancer because http clients open new connections more regularly (consider the lifetime of a browser page with the lifetime of a backend daemon). Each new connection is a load balancing opportunity for the naive layer 4 balancer. If you never make new connections, then it never has an opportunity to load balance. grpc has plenty of complexity for "let applications do their own load balancing", including built-in load balancing algorithms and built-in service discovery and health discovery (xDS); http/2 doesn't have any of this. Whether these are actually part of grpc or just random add-ons to popular client libraries is somewhat up for debate, however.