Prior to #13244, connect proxies and gateways could only be configured by an
xDS session served by the local client agent.
In an upcoming release, it will be possible to deploy a Consul service mesh
without client agents. In this model, xDS sessions will be handled by the
servers themselves, which necessitates load-balancing to prevent a single
server from receiving a disproportionate amount of load and becoming
overwhelmed.
This introduces a simple form of load-balancing where Consul will attempt to
achieve an even spread of load (xDS sessions) between all healthy servers.
It does so by implementing a concurrent session limiter (limiter.SessionLimiter)
and adjusting the limit according to autopilot state and proxy service
registrations in the catalog.
If a server is already over capacity (i.e. the session limit is lowered),
Consul will begin draining sessions to rebalance the load. This will result
in the client receiving a `RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED` status code. It is the client's
responsibility to observe this response and reconnect to a different server.
Users of the gRPC client connection brokered by the
consul-server-connection-manager library will get this for free.
The rate at which Consul will drain sessions to rebalance load is scaled
dynamically based on the number of proxies in the catalog.
