gRPC and Protocol Buffers
Backend services often exchange structured requests and responses at high volume. If every team hand-writes HTTP routes, JSON models, client wrappers, validation assumptions, and error handling, the same interface is implemented several times—and those implementations can drift.
gRPC approaches this problem as typed remote procedure calls. A service publishes methods such as GetOrder or WatchOrders. A compiler generates client and server interfaces from a shared contract, and the runtime carries calls over HTTP/2.
Protocol Buffers, or Protobuf, is the default contract language and message encoding used by gRPC. A .proto file defines services and message types. Protobuf serializes message values into a compact binary representation identified by numeric field tags.
The two technologies are related but separate:
- Protobuf can serialize data without gRPC.
- gRPC can support payload formats other than Protobuf.
- In ordinary gRPC systems, they are used together because code generation, typing, and binary serialization form one coherent workflow.
The convenient method-call syntax must not hide the network. A remote call can time out, be retried, reach a different process, partially complete, or fail after the server performed its side effect. gRPC provides useful machinery for these situations, but it does not turn a distributed call into a local function call.