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HTTP/2 client: allow managedPersistentHttp2 to balance over multiple connections #1248

Description

@pjfanning

Problem

There is currently no way to ask the HTTP/2 client for more than one live connection to a
single authority, which makes client-side load balancing impossible to build on top of it.

pekko-grpc hits this directly. Its pekko-http client backend resolves a service name to a
set of endpoints via Pekko Discovery and is supposed to spread requests over them
(round_robin, as the netty backend does via grpc-java). What it can do today is in
PekkoHttpClientUtils:

  • a ClientTransport.withCustomResolver that round-robins over the discovered addresses, and
  • builder.managedPersistentHttp2() feeding a single Source.queue.

Because managedPersistentHttp2 maintains exactly one connection, the resolver is only
consulted when that connection is (re)established. So every request from a given client goes
to whichever endpoint was picked at connect time; the counter buys failover across reconnects,
not balancing. pekko-grpc's LoadBalancingIntegrationSpec is
commented out
for the pekko-http backend for this reason, and GrpcClientSettings.withLoadBalancingPolicy
is silently ignored there.

This is the pekko side of akka/akka-grpc#1197 ("Client-side loadbalancing with the Akka HTTP
backend"), which is still open upstream with the API question unanswered.

Why the existing issue doesn't cover it

#484 asks for an HTTP/2 pool behind singleRequest, described there as "keeps a single
managed persistent HTTP/2 connection per host and automatically dispatches requests based
on the host to that connection". That is a different axis: it gives one connection per
distinct authority. Here all the endpoints share one authority (greeter, or whatever
overrideAuthority says) and differ only in the resolved socket address, so a per-host pool
would still collapse them onto one connection.

Proposed fix

Add a multi-connection variant of the managed persistent flow to OutgoingConnectionBuilder,
keeping the existing Flow[HttpRequest, HttpResponse, NotUsed] shape so it is a drop-in
replacement:

@ApiMayChange
def managedPersistentHttp2(connections: Int): Flow[HttpRequest, HttpResponse, NotUsed]

@ApiMayChange
def managedPersistentHttp2WithPriorKnowledge(connections: Int): Flow[HttpRequest, HttpResponse, NotUsed]

Implementation is mostly wiring in OutgoingConnectionBuilderImpl: materialize connections
independent PersistentConnection.managedConnection(http2(), ...) sub-flows, fan requests out
over them and merge the responses back. Correlating responses already works — HTTP/2 requests
must carry a RequestResponseAssociation, and PersistentConnection already relies on that,
so an unordered merge is safe.

The key property for the load-balancing use case is that each sub-flow establishes its own
connection through the configured ClientTransport, so a caller-supplied custom resolver is
invoked once per connection and can hand out a different endpoint each time. pekko-grpc then
gets round-robin over discovered endpoints without any new discovery API in pekko-http, and
can enable the spec that is currently commented out.

Design questions

  • Fan-out strategy. A plain Balance is the cheap option but routes to whichever sub-flow
    pulls first. A PersistentConnection that is unconnected or sitting in its reconnect embargo
    will still accept a request and buffer it, so Balance can steer traffic towards a broken
    endpoint. Something that prefers connected sub-flows, or routes by fewest outstanding
    requests, would behave much better and is closer to what gRPC's round_robin does.
  • Should the connection count be dynamic? Fixed connections: Int is the small version.
    Resizing as the discovered endpoint set changes is the fuller answer, but needs pekko-http
    to know about endpoint sets — which is the "how much of this should be a new API on the HTTP
    side" question from Client-side loadbalancing with the Akka HTTP backend akka/akka-grpc#1197. Suggest starting fixed.
  • Config. Optionally a pekko.http.client.http2.connections default alongside the existing
    max-persistent-attempts / base-connection-backoff keys, though the builder argument may be
    enough given this is a per-client decision.
  • javadsl parity in pekko.http.javadsl.OutgoingConnectionBuilder and its adapter.
  • connections = 1 should stay behaviourally identical to today's overload.

Both existing methods are already @ApiMayChange, so adding overloads here is cheap.

Alternatives considered

pekko-grpc could manage N managedPersistentHttp2 flows itself and round-robin singleRequest
across them, entirely inside PekkoHttpClientUtils and with no pekko-http change. That works,
but it reimplements connection health and eviction logic in a downstream project, and any other
user wanting HTTP/2 client-side load balancing would have to do the same.

Activity

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