gRPC Deep Dive

When you're designing a system with dozens of microservices, each making thousands of calls per second to other services, the choice of communication protocol matters. A lot.

REST over HTTP/1.1 has served us well for decades, but it wasn't designed for this world. Every request requires a new TCP connection or waits for a connection from the pool. JSON parsing adds latency. There's no built-in support for streaming. And every team invents their own conventions for error handling, pagination, and authentication.

gRPC was built specifically to solve these problems. Google developed it based on lessons learned from their internal RPC system, Stubby, which handles billions of requests per second across their infrastructure.

The result is a framework that offers significant performance improvements, strong typing across language boundaries, and first-class support for streaming.