Networking

gRPC

HTTP/2 + Protobuf RPC framework.


In plain terms

Bi-directional streaming, codegen in 12+ languages, schema-first. Default for internal microservice meshes.

Origin

Google open-sourced gRPC in 2015, descended from their internal Stubby RPC system that had been running since the mid-2000s. Built on HTTP/2 (released 2015) and Protobuf (2008). Now a CNCF graduated project.

Where it shows up in production
  • Google Cloud APIs Every GCP service has a gRPC API behind the REST one; client libraries use gRPC by default.
  • etcd & Kubernetes The kube-apiserver speaks gRPC to etcd; CRI and CSI are gRPC interfaces.
  • Stripe internal mesh Documented in their tech blog as the standard for internal service-to-service.
On Semicolony
Sources & further reading
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