Road to gRPC

Cloudflare has launched support for gRPC, an open source RPC framework running over HTTP/2. The company faced several challenges while implementing the support, including lack of full HTTP trailer header support in their edge proxy and the need to use HTTP/2 to connect to origins. To overcome these issues, they decided to convert gRPC messages to HTTP/1.1 without a trailer inside their network and then back to HTTP/2 before sending the request off to origin. They also built support for HTTP/2 connections to origin servers in-house. The resulting feature allows users to secure and accelerate their gRPC service using Cloudflare.