Our guest post today comes from Brandon Phillips of CoreOS. CoreOS builds open source projects and products for Linux Containers. Their flagship product for consensus and discovery etcd and their container engine rkt are early adopters of gRPC.
One of the key reasons CoreOS chose gRPC is because it uses HTTP/2, enabling applications to present both a HTTP 1.1 REST/JSON API and an efficient gRPC interface on a single TCP port (available for Go). This provides developers with compatibility with the REST web ecosystem, while advancing a new, high-efficiency RPC protocol. With the recent release of Go 1.6, Go ships with a stable net/http2 package by default.
Today we are happy to provide an update that significantly simplifies the getting started experience for gRPC.
For most languages, the gRPC runtime can now be installed in a single step via native package managers such as npm for Node.js, gem for Ruby and pip for Python. Even though our Node, Ruby and Python runtimes are wrapped on gRPC’s C core, users now don’t need to explicitly pre-install the C core library as a package in most Linux distributions. We autofetch it for you :-).
For Java, we have simplified the steps needed to add gRPC support to your build tools by providing plugins for Maven and Gradle. These let you easily depend on the core runtime to deploy or ship generated libraries into production environments.
You can also use our Dockerfiles to use these updated packages - deploying microservices built on gRPC should now be a very simple experience.
Google Cloud PubSub is Google’s scalable real-time messaging service that lets users send and receive messages between independent applications. It’s an important part of Google Cloud Platform’s big data offering, and is used by customers worldwide to build their own robust, global services. However, until now, the only way to use the Cloud PubSub API was via JSON over HTTP. That’s all changed with the release of PubSub gRPC alpha. Now users can access PubSub via gRPC and benefit from all the advantages it brings.
The gRPC team is excited to announce the immediate availability of gRPC Beta. This release marks an important point in API stability and going forward most API changes are expected to be additive in nature. This milestone opens the door for gRPC use in production environments.
Google has been using a single general-purpose RPC infrastructure called Stubby to connect the large number of microservices running within and across our data centers for over a decade. Our internal systems have long embraced the microservice architecture gaining popularity today. Having a uniform, cross-platform RPC infrastructure has allowed for the rollout of fleet-wide improvements in efficiency, security, reliability and behavioral analysis critical to supporting the incredible growth seen in that period.