Can you use gRPC/gRPC-Web to communicate between Microservices hosted on Azure?

user_14576743 0
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I am currently designing a Microservice Architecture, I am very new to the topic, and this question doesn't seem to be explicitly answered anywhere.

Is it possible to Communicate between Microservices (Azure App Services) with gRPC? Could it perhaps be done with Containers or Kestrel in some way so it could support HTTP/2?

I have the following example working when hosted locally: enter image description here

However when hosting them in In Azure it does not seem to work:

Basically Is it even possible to use gRPC in Azure or would I have to use gRPC-Web for all communications? Or are there any Recommendations/Alternatives like REST/SignalR?

grpc-web microservices grpc azure-web-app-service azure
5 Answers

gRPC is now supported in Azure Web App service but only for Linux-based Web App.

Here is the official documentation on how to set it up.

Basically, you just need to configure your app to open a port which supports HTTP 2. In .NET Kestrel you do it like this (in example below it's in port 8585):

// Configure Kestrel to listen on a specific HTTP port 
builder.WebHost.ConfigureKestrel(options => 
{ 
    options.ListenAnyIP(8080); 
    options.ListenAnyIP(8585, listenOptions => 
    { 
        listenOptions.Protocols = Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel.Core.HttpProtocols.Http2; 
    }); 
});

Then you need to configure HTTP version and proxy in your web app

grpc in azure webapp

Then you need to add an environment variable pointing to the port 8585

grpc setting in azure webapp

I can confirm gRPC already works in West Europe region.

user_8236800
user_76876660

As of now (December 2021), this issue is still open (since April 2019) https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/9020

Azure App Services uses IIS/Windows/Http.sys. Http.sys is baked into the OS and doesn't fully support HTTP/2 trailing headers that gRPC depends on.

user_2917190

Figured it out. Ended up using Dapr, a Microservice building package. Its pretty great so far, and it has built in GRPC Support

user_145767430
user_4724630
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