[Feature] [OAP] Combining HTTP and gRPC on a Single Port through Armeria

[mrproliu]

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• I had searched in the issues and found no similar feature requirement.

Description

HTTP and gRPC services cannot share the same port due to protocol differences in the OAP. However, integrating the Armeria framework makes it possible to share a single port among different protocols.

We have already employed Armeria on the HTTP services, but our gRPC services have not yet been integrated with Armeria. By consolidating these services using Armeria, we can bind multiple protocols to the same port, streamlining our server configuration and enhancing our system's flexibility and efficiency.

Use case

After using Armeria, using multiple ports with different protocols (gRPC, HTTP) in OAP can be reduced.

Related issues

No response

Are you willing to submit a pull request to implement this on your own?

• Yes I am willing to submit a pull request on my own!

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[kezhenxu94]

What's the scope of this issue, does it aim at combining the HTTP and gRPC of the telemetry collecting endpoints (11800 and 12800), or does it also include other HTTP/gRPC protocols such as otel collector or Zipkin endpoints?

[wu-sheng]

I want to unify the stack and reduce the confusion of users about which port to use, but to keep compatibility, all existing port should be kept.

So 11800 and 12800 should share the HTTP and gRPC. 11800 will become the primary port, and 12800 as secondary port.
Meanwhile, as Zipkin port should keep to handle HTTP traffic only.

WDYT?

[kezhenxu94]

I want to unify the stack and reduce the confusion of users about which port to use, but to keep compatibility, all existing port should be kept.

So 11800 and 12800 should share the HTTP and gRPC. 11800 will become the primary port, and 12800 as secondary port. Meanwhile, as Zipkin port should keep to handle HTTP traffic only.

WDYT?

Sounds reasonable, I've been thinking of reducing the ports we used, one reason stops me to do so is that, different ports has different functionality and for the sake of security, users need to configure different security policies for different ports, for example, 11800 may be internally accessible only inside data center but 12800 may need to be accessible in end user's browser, it may be still possible to configure different security policies after combining the ports but it is foreseeably more complex.

[wu-sheng]

If consider keeping security controllable, we just make receiver port unified and query separately.

This should be better?

query port and receiver port and core port for internal communications.

[wu-sheng]

Move to 10.2, as we are busy this month.

[mrproliu]

I have created a project to street test the performance of the native gRPC framework vs Armeria gPRC framework.

It seems that in unary scenarios, native gRPC is slightly stronger than Armeria gRPC. However. But in streaming scenarios (the main usage of SkyWalking OAP), it appears that Armeria gRPC outperforms native gRPC by more than 20%.

[lujiajing1126]

IIRC, in the scenario of Istio, the port of service are named after their protocol, for example, grpc-80, http-8080. And then the envoy will choose a proper protocol based on the prefix of the port (or based on an extra appProtocol field: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/#application-protocol). If a port is serving two kinds of application protocol, I suppose the proxy cannot work as expected.

So I am not sure if combining ports is a good choice considering such cases.

[wu-sheng]

Thanks for pointing out this.

@mrproliu we could consider replace stack only?

[mrproliu]

Yes, I think we should only replace the original tech stack, and keep the current configuration.

[mrproliu]

After gaining a deeper understanding of the Armeria framework, I found that by default it does not execute business logic in a separate thread pool but directly in the Event Pool. So I tried adding a Time.Sleep operation to Streaming again and found that its execution time increased significantly.

Then I attempted to use the BlockingThreadExecutor feature to customize the thread pool and discovered that its performance dropped sharply compared to the native gRPC framework. Therefore, this solution is temporarily not considered.