Build your next REST API with gRPC
Tim Burks (timburks@google.com, @timburks)

timburks@google.com
@timburks
Electronic Design Automation
Mobile Apps
APIs
Hello!

Projects at Google
gnostic
(OpenAPI Compiler)
gRPC-Swift
GAPICs for
Google APIs
API Lifecycle

1
What is gRPC?

“gRPC is a modern open source high
performance RPC framework that can run in
any environment. It can efficiently connect
services in and across data centers with
pluggable support for load balancing, tracing,
health checking and authentication. It is also
applicable in last mile of distributed computing
to connect devices, mobile applications and
browsers to backend services.”
grpc.io

How a gRPC service is called:
ALWAYS specification-first.
Clients are generated from API
descriptions written in the Protocol Buffer
language.

How a gRPC service is built:
ALWAYS specification-first.
Service code is generated. Typically this
generated code declares an interface that is
implemented in language-native data
structures and patterns.

2
Why implement
your API with
gRPC?

APIs have a native language.

gRPC scales to multiple programming languages.
Java
Service
Python
Service
Go
Service
C++
Service
gRPC
Server
gRPC
Stub
gRPC
Stub
gRPC
Stub
gRPC
Stub
gRPC
Server
gRPC
Server
gRPC
Server
gRPC
Stub

gRPC scales to distributed systems.

gRPC is open and extensible.

gRPC has a style guide.

3
Implementing
OpenAPI Services
with gRPC

Build a gRPC service, get a free REST API!
Originally defined in
google/api/http.proto
Now documented in AIP-127:
HTTP and gRPC Transcoding
Implemented by
gRPC-gateway, Envoy, etc.

?
transcoding

gnostic-grpc (end-to-end example)

@LorenzHoWe
@no_d_here
@timburks