grpc-node: @grpc/grpc-js not working with aws ALB

Problem description

I was trying to use grpc with ALB, considering this documentation from AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/aws/new-application-load-balancer-support-for-end-to-end-http-2-and-grpc/

I created the Load balancer, target group, cluster, service and task definition using an ECR image with this hello-world server example from grpc repo. I tried dynamic and static proto generation and both returned this error:

Error: 13 INTERNAL: Received RST_STREAM with code 2 triggered by internal client error: Protocol error
(node:1500234) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: 13 INTERNAL: Received RST_STREAM with code 2 triggered by internal client error: Protocol error
    at Object.callErrorFromStatus (/home/gustavosartori/validate-grpc-alb/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/call.js:31:26)
    at Object.onReceiveStatus (/home/gustavosartori/validate-grpc-alb/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/client.js:180:52)
    at Object.onReceiveStatus (/home/gustavosartori/validate-grpc-alb/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/client-interceptors.js:336:141)
    at Object.onReceiveStatus (/home/gustavosartori/validate-grpc-alb/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/client-interceptors.js:299:181)
    at /home/gustavosartori/validate-grpc-alb/node_modules/@grpc/grpc-js/build/src/call-stream.js:160:78
    at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:77:11)

After that to make sure the error wasn’t in my hello-world server I changed the ECR image to another grpc-server(using @grpc/grpc-jt) that I already have working on aws, and the error persists.

To finish I decided to test using the python hello world example, and it worked, so I believe the @grpc/grpc-js have some bad interaction with ALB, but I don’t know exactly how debug this

Reproduction steps

Upload to ECR any grpc server (I used this hello-world example)
Create a Cluster making sure to use an security group that allow traffic to the port used in the Dockerfile;
Create a Target group: type = instance; protocol = http; port = 50051; protocol version = grpc;
Create an Application Load Balancer configured to listen on 50051 and route to the just created target group;
Create a task definition using the image uploaded to ECR
Create a service to this task definition, in the load balancing section select the load balancer and target group created for the test
Start de client using the dns of the ALB as url

Environment

Fedora 35
Node version 14.18.0]
Node installation method: asdf
Package name: “@grpc/grpc-js”: “^1.1.0”, “@grpc/proto-loader”: “^0.5.0”

Additional context

I tried generate a cert with openssl in order to no use grcp.createInsecure, but it changed nothin

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 2 years ago
Reactions: 3
Comments: 21 (6 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I’ve been looking into this with @g-sartori and we found the problem.

ALB ensures that only HTTPS listeners can foward requests to a gRPC target group, but we were consuming the server like it did’nt had any TLS/SSL in front of it. So we changed the way we created the client and it worked.

We were creating the client like this

var client = new hello_proto.Greeter(target, grpc.credentials.createInsecure())

And we changed to this

var client = new hello_proto.Greeter(target, grpc.credentials.createSsl())

In this documentation https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/aws/new-application-load-balancer-support-for-end-to-end-http-2-and-grpc/ they do the same thing for the python hello-word example using credentials = grpc.ssl_channel_credentials()

cabulafhy on May 4, 2022

That capture shows that the server is responding with the error HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request. Something is misconfigured and the front end your client is talking to isn’t handling HTTP/2. And the client doesn’t understand an HTTP/1.1 response to an HTTP/2 request, so that’s why the error is “Protocol error”.

murgatroid99 on Apr 20, 2022

Can you please share the raw pcap file? I would like to look at it in Wireshark to see how it parses the HTTP/2 data from the actual bytes that went over the wire.

murgatroid99 on Apr 19, 2022