gRPC (gRPC Remote Procedure Calls) is a cross-platform high-performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework. gRPC was initially created by Google, but is

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and is used in many organizations. Use cases range from microservices to the "last mile" of computing (mobile, web, and Internet of Things). gRPC uses HTTP/2 for transport,

Protocol Buffers Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data. The method involves an int ...

as the

interface description language interface description language or interface definition language (IDL), is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language. IDLs describe an inter ...

, and provides features such as authentication, bidirectional streaming and flow control, blocking or nonblocking bindings, and cancellation and timeouts. It generates cross-platform client and server bindings for many languages. Most common usage scenarios include connecting services in a microservices style architecture, or connecting mobile device clients to backend services. gRPC's use of HTTP/2 is considered complex. It makes it impossible to implement a gRPC client in the browser, instead requiring a proxy.

History

From about 2001, Google created a general-purpose RPC infrastructure called Stubby to connect the large number of microservices running within and across its data centers. In March 2015, Google decided to build the next version of Stubby and make it open source. The result was gRPC.

Authentication

gRPC supports the usage of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and token-based authentication. Connection to Google services must use TLS. There are two types of credentials: channel credentials and call credentials. For token-based authorization, gRPC provides Server Interceptor and a Client Interceptor.

Encoding

gRPC uses

to encode data. Protocol buffers provide a serialization format and an Interface Definition Language.

Testing

Some of the software tools used for testing gRPC implementations include Postman, ezy, Insomnia, and Step CI.

Adoption

Many organizations use gRPC, including Uber, Square, Netflix, IBM, CoreOS, Docker, CockroachDB, Arista Networks, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Spotify,

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, Dropbox, and Google as the original developer. The open source project u-bmc uses gRPC to replace

Intelligent Platform Management Interface The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a set of computer interface specifications for an autonomous computer subsystem that provides management and monitoring capabilities independently of the host system's CPU, firmware ( BIOS o ...

(IPMI). On 8 January 2019, Dropbox announced that the next version of "Courier", their RPC framework at the core of their service-oriented architecture (SOA), would be migrated to be based on gRPC, primarily because it aligned well with their existing custom RPC frameworks.

Alternatives

* Cap'n Proto *

Apache Thrift Thrift is an interface definition language and binary communication protocol used for defining and creating services for numerous programming languages. It was developed at Facebook for "scalable cross-language services development" and as of ...

* Apache Avro * JSON-RPC * XML-RPC

References

External links

gRPC Home PagegRPC – github.comgRPC – opensource.google.com
{{Google FOSS Remote procedure call Software using the Apache license Google software Free software programmed in C++ Free software programmed in Python