A high-performance, language-agnostic RPC framework built by Google — uses HTTP/2 for transport and Protocol Buffers for binary message serialization, far faster than REST/JSON for service-to-service communication.
gRPC defines services and messages in .proto files, then generates strongly-typed client and server code for many languages (Go, Python, Java, C++, TypeScript). Communication is over HTTP/2 with binary Protobuf payloads — much smaller and faster to parse than JSON. gRPC supports unary calls (request/response), server streaming, client streaming, and bidirectional streaming. The dominant choice for internal microservice communication; REST/JSON remains more common at public API boundaries.
Replacing JSON REST inter-service calls between two Python microservices with gRPC — 3-5× throughput and dramatically tighter latency tails.
gRPC is the right choice for internal service-to-service performance; REST is the right choice when humans need to read responses or third-party developers need to consume the API.
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