Transcoding and Gateways

An interface that works well for internal services may not be convenient for every consumer. An inventory team might expose gRPC methods internally, while a partner wants ordinary HTTPS endpoints with JSON and a browser application needs an interface its networking tools can consume. Reimplementing reservation logic for each audience would create several places where stock and retry rules could disagree.

A gateway can expose an HTTP interface that calls a gRPC service.

This chapter explains how transcoding maps requests and responses, which responsibilities belong at the gateway, and why a shared backend still needs careful review of both API surfaces.