They must all be GRPC users. Developers are pushing GRPC and protobuf pretty hard in companies. The next step down the road is to move to envoy as the load balancer. Otherwise these protocols don't work well over traditional HTTP infrastructure.

So, seems like nginx is fine until your company reaches the "we are worth billions now" scale?

nginx is never fine for load balancing, they put basic features like metrics behind the paid edition. It's not sane to operate in production.

https://thehftguy.com/2016/10/03/haproxy-vs-nginx-why-you-sh...

I work for a billions company. Nginx is still fine. Youll need to be prepared to pay for better operations, management, visibility, and protocol support. You can either pay them or build it in house, but you will want to pay.

discord is also on that list - although we have not spoken much about it yet!