Autoscaling Elastic Kubernetes Infrastructure for Stateful Applications Using Proxyless gRPC and Istio

This talk addresses the challenge of autoscaling elastic Kubernetes infrastructure for stateful applications, specifically those using proxyless gRPC and Istio. The presenters explore how to maintain stateful sessions between clients and servers in the presence of load balancing, even when the set of backends changes. The solution involves using HTTP Cookies to achieve persistent or stateful sessions via Istio and proxyless gRPC. The discussion also covers the use-case of 'draining backends' during infrastructure downsizing without breaking session persistence. They delve into implementing stateful session affinity using cookies and how this is managed in proxyless gRPC, with Istio providing configuration via XDS. The talk also touches on the complexities of canary deployments and traffic shifting with stateful sessions and presents a real-life use case from Broadcom.