Keepalive is recommended to use when your peer dies before it is able to notify you or does not notify you. The reasons can be kernel panic, termination of the process handling that pee

Hence, if a server does not send GOAWAY to the client, the grpc client will send packets to the TCP peer but the TCP peer will not send any packets. This can happen when a server nodes goes down due to machine failure, release/rollouts.

Adding keepalive will prevent requests being blackholed/client being hung.