gRPC load balancing in Kubernetes, with and without a mesh

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A new service sent thousands of gRPC requests per second and overloaded a single pod of the receiver. The cause: Istio was not on for the receiver yet. Switch the mode and watch the counters.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Matthias. I work on internal developer platforms: the clusters, pipelines and golden paths that other engineers build on. Most of my day is Kubernetes and Go, plus the decisions, big and small, that keep a system boring in the best sense.

This site exists for two reasons. First, so that there is one place on the internet that says I exist. Second, as a notebook. When I learn something the hard way, I write it down here so that the next person (often me) learns it the easy way.

Matthias Weilinger

gRPC load balancing in Kubernetes, with and without a mesh

About