The encyclopedia · Software & IT · Technical decision · 2015
Google rebuilt its internal RPC on open HTTP/2 and gave the world gRPC
Google turned a decade of internal RPC into gRPC on HTTP/2 and Protobuf, and it became the standard for microservice calls.
the move
Google had run a general-purpose RPC system called Stubby for years, but it was bound to Google's own stack and too coupled to release.
When SPDY, HTTP/2 and QUIC arrived in public standards, Google reworked Stubby onto that public transport with Protobuf for messages.
What was released as gRPC in 2015 was a uniform, cross-platform RPC framework not tied to any one vendor's infrastructure.
why it works
- HTTP/2 gave multiplexing and header compression, so many calls shared one connection.
- Protobuf gave compact, typed messages across many languages.
- Running on public standards made it portable to cloud, mobile and browser rather than internal-only.
- Cross-language, streaming and built-in authentication made it the default for service-to-service calls.
what transfers
A company's best internal tool becomes a standard when it is rebuilt on public protocols rather than on the company's private plumbing.
what came after
gRPC became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project and is now a leading way to connect microservices and mobile or IoT backends, alongside REST for public APIs.
references
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.