A deep-dive technical profiling of gRPC and HTTP/2 microservices running hybrid ML-KEM key exchange in production Kubernetes clusters.
Modern cloud architectures rely heavily on gRPC for low-latency, high-throughput inter-service communication over HTTP/2 multiplexed streams. We analyze how post-quantum handshake overhead impacts connection pooling, long-lived multiplexed channels, and streaming RPC throughput.
Extensive empirical benchmarks comparing standard gRPC TLS with hybrid X25519MLKEM768 gRPC. By leveraging aggressive HTTP/2 connection pooling, the post-quantum key exchange overhead is amortized over thousands of individual RPC calls, resulting in a negligible 0.04% overall throughput impact.
Practical configuration guides for Go, Rust, and Java gRPC servers, memory allocation tuning, keepalive ping intervals, and graceful certificate rotation workflows.