A Lightweight gRPC-Compatible Implementation for Sidecars - Tim Burks, Agent IO

Don't miss out! Join us at our next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Salt Lake City, United States (Nov 9–12, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io A Lightweight gRPC-Compatible Implementation for Sidecars - Tim Burks, Agent IO gRPC is more than just a protocol: it's an opinionated set of tools and recommended ways to build servers and clients of networked APIs. But what if you have different opinions? Not all of us work in Google-scale contexts with monorepos containing thousands of services, strict controls over those implementations, and a fleet of engineers to keep them all up-to-date. Sidecar is a Go library that supports gRPC wire protocols in the most minimal way possible: using the Go standard library and virtually no external dependencies. Originally created to communicate with sidecar proxies over Linux abstract sockets, Sidecar builds on Go generics, concurrency primitives, and native HTTP2 support to make gRPC clear, simple, and maintainable. Sidecar grew out of IO, a new Envoy controller that was created to bring the powers of service meshes to individual developers. We'll talk about how IO and Sidecar work together to create a new class of secure and maintainable applications.