Scaling gRPC Applications via Static Load Balancing

Static load balancing can be used by gRPC clients when the exact addresses of all the remote gRPC services are known in advance. It's only applicable in situations where these addresses remain static. None of the addresses get added or removed. Therefore, if all the addresses of all the remote service instances are already known, we don't need to connect to any additional networked services, such as a DNS server. We can store these addresses in the gRPC client application itself.

The gRPC client libraries on .NET still help us ensure that we do the bare minimum to connect to the remote service addresses. We can configure the client to use a specific load balancing logic, such as connecting to different endpoints in a round-robin fashion. However, the list of the addresses to connect to will still be maintained by the client application.

To demonstrate how static load balancing works, we have the following setup that contains a web application with a gRPC client and a single instance of a gRPC service. We'll make some changes to the web ...