gRPC: 5 Years Later, Is It Still Worth It?
Talkat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · on Wednesday, 2025-04-02· at 15:15· Level 1 | Hall Entrance N10 | Room H·
summary
Five years of gRPC at a Go microservices shop powers millions of automations per day and yields unified, generated clients and strict backward-compatibility enforced by linters, but costs appear early: proto dependency pain, duplicated messages across service boundaries, and frontend friction from gRPC‑web (no caching, base64 POSTs, special debugging). Kubernetes requires extra work so the stack uses Linkerd for HTTP/2 load balancing. Buff tooling and its service registry fixes many pain points, and the setup proves worth it.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:50Torque and tech stack
- 3:38gRPC over REST choice
- 5:44gRPC basics and features
- 8:14API design at Torque
- 11:07gRPC with Docker
- 12:51Proto files in microservices
- 13:13gRPC benefits at Torque
- 14:57Custom gRPC options
- 16:02Five years of gRPC lessons
- 17:26gRPC in Kubernetes challenges
- 18:52Message reuse pitfalls
- 19:56gRPC Web frontend issues
- 21:26Security and public APIs
- 22:31gRPC Gateway trade-offs
- 23:36Buf for gRPC workflows
- 25:10Connect RPC frontend
- 26:17gRPC still worth it?
- 27:25Q&A
