gRPC services

gRPC (gRPC Remote Procedure Call) is an open-source, high-performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework developed by Google. It enables client and server applications to communicate efficiently across various programming languages by leveraging HTTP/2 for transport and Protocol Buffers for…

Key facts

First appeared: 2015
Category: technology
Problem solved: gRPC was created to provide an efficient, strongly-typed, and language-agnostic mechanism for inter-service communication, particularly addressing the performance and schema enforcement limitations of traditional REST/HTTP 1.1 + JSON for modern microservices and mobile backends. It aimed to bring Google's battle-tested internal RPC efficiency to the open-source community.
Platforms: Android, macOS, Linux, Cloud-native environments, iOS, Windows

Related technologies

Envoy
Protocol Buffers
Istio
Cloud computing platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Load Balancers
API Gateways
Microservices architectures
Docker
Kubernetes

Notable users

Google
Amazon
Netflix
Lyft
Microsoft
Square
IBM
Cisco