gRPC Conf 2024

Datadog has been using gRPC for many years. Hundreds of engineers are using it on a daily basis, and hundreds of millions of requests flow through our system across hundreds of thousands of processes every second to serve the product. Despite this scale, our setup has remained very basic: DNS for service discovery, and all tuning and customizations embedded directly in client and server code. We recently adapted the xDS control plane that configures all our standalone load balancers to support direct proxyless gRPC integration. In this session, we will describe the gains users can expect from using xDS for service discovery instead of DNS: faster endpoint propagation time, centralization of service configuration, and access to more advanced load balancing and traffic management features. We will describe the effort that went into it, and how it is playing out in practice. By the end of the talk, attendees will better understand what xDS can do for their gRPC setup.