Reducing Cross-Zone Egress at Spotify with Custom gRPC Load Balancing
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 22/03/2024

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Reducing Cross-Zone Egress at Spotify with Custom gRPC Load Balancing - Aleksandar Mitic & Yannick Epstein, Spotify

A fundamental building block of highly available microservice architectures are availability zones. While it benefits the availability and resilience of microservices, it results in traffic crossing networking boundaries when communicating across zones. In managed clouds, crossing networking boundaries comes at a monetary cost. A significant portion of Spotify’s networking bill is the result of cross-zone traffic. Therefore, it has been an important business need for Spotify to reduce the amount of cross-zone traffic while maintaining the availability and resiliency of service communication. With gRPC, adopters can build their own load balancing algorithms and utilize technologies like ORCA to exchange advanced load balancing information between clients and servers. This talk will cover how Spotify uses gRPC to adapt their backend to backend load balancing to specific business needs: in particular reducing cross-zone traffic, while maintaining low latency and high availability.