In my previous role, I struggled with slow Pod cold starts. Whenever a Pod spun up, incoming requests would pile up and wait until it was finally ready. Most of that delay came from running Envoy just to handle the gRPC-Web → gRPC translation layer. It felt like using a huge, complex system for a very small piece of functionality.
That experience pushed me to build Griffin — a lightweight proxy designed specifically to remove that bottleneck. Griffin is built on top of hyper.rs and focuses on doing one thing well: translating gRPC-Web requests into standard gRPC calls.
The result is a proxy that’s incredibly small and fast. Griffin’s binary is only 1 MB, which is:
- 100× smaller than a full Envoy build (~140 MB+)
- 15× smaller than grpcwebproxy (~15.3 MB)
- no garbage collector
- Handles both gRPC-Web and standard gRPC traffic (explain in here)
- Telemetry support (Prometheus)
- Health check support
- Hot configuration reload (explain in here)
- CORS support
- TLS support
griffin -c config.yaml
You can find example config file here default_config.yaml.
- rustc 1.91.0
- cargo 1.81.0
git clone https://github.com/exajoy/griffin
cd griffin
cargo build --release
cargo nextest run --all
You can see more FAQs in here.
Please feel free to open issues or submit pull requests. Make sure to follow the existing code style and include tests for any new features or bug fixes.