Definition: High-performance remote communication framework developed by Google that uses Protocol Buffers and HTTP/2 for efficient service-to-service communication.
— Source: NERVICO, Product Development Consultancy
What is gRPC
gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) is a high-performance, open-source remote communication framework developed by Google. It allows one service to call functions on another remote service as if they were local calls, using Protocol Buffers as the serialization format and HTTP/2 as the transport protocol. Unlike REST, which works with resources and HTTP verbs, gRPC works with service definitions and typed procedure calls.
How it works
Developers define services and messages in a .proto file using Protocol Buffers. From that definition, gRPC automatically generates client and server code in multiple languages (Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, among others). Communication travels over HTTP/2, enabling request multiplexing, header compression, and bidirectional streaming. gRPC supports four communication patterns: unary (request-response), server streaming, client streaming, and bidirectional streaming.
Why it matters
In microservices architectures with high-frequency internal communication, protocol efficiency makes a significant difference. gRPC serializes data in binary format (up to 10 times faster than JSON), maintains persistent connections, and supports native streaming. This makes it the preferred choice for service-to-service communication where latency and throughput are critical.
Practical example
An e-commerce platform has a catalog service, an inventory service, and a pricing service. With REST, each product query requires three independent HTTP calls with JSON serialization. With gRPC, all three calls use multiplexed persistent HTTP/2 connections and binary serialization. The result: product page latency drops from 120 milliseconds to 35 milliseconds, and internal bandwidth consumption decreases by 60%.