Building a gRPC Proxyless World - How Reddit Scaled Resilience With XDS

Learn how Reddit engineers scaled their multi-cluster, multi-region, multi-cloud Kubernetes environment by implementing a proxyless gRPC architecture using XDS integration in this 17-minute conference talk from CNCF. Discover Reddit's solution to the complexity of service routing in distributed infrastructure, where service owners previously had to choose between Kubernetes DNS or custom application code for routing decisions. Explore the implementation of gRPC and XDS integration that provides standardized routing, enabling clients to perform client-local load balancing with ORCA data while maintaining a control plane that replicates routes across cluster boundaries. Understand how multi-cluster service discovery allows smart clients to use a single service name that works both locally within clusters and automatically selects the nearest cluster. Examine this architecture that eliminates the need for proxies while providing infrastructure teams with a control surface for efficient load balancing across all workloads in Reddit's complex distributed system.