gRPC and What, Why, How?

30-minute Talk - Sunday, July 28 at 12:45pm in Cartoon 2

You might have overheard yet another acronym "gRPC" getting thrown when talking about a replacement of REST or when mentioning microservices. In this talk, we will be looking into what gRPC is, the reasons why you would use it, how you would use it with Python and talk about considerations for running gRPC services in production.

gRPC and what, why, how?

In this talk, we will be covering the following topics:

  • What is gRPC? We will be talking about serialization and what RPC is in general. We will quickly skim over the history of previous similar protocols for example: SOAP and CORBA. We will be talking about the problem space these protocols tried to resolve and why it slowly lost popularity.

    We will be giving a quick overview of RESTful services and what has been done so far to support RESTful services.

    We will look into the history of gRPC and how it came to be.

  • Why use gRPC? With a segway from the first topic we will be looking into what gRPC is doing differently than the previous generation RPC solutions and pros/cons against using REST.

  • How can we use gRPC with Python? Will showcase via live coding(or code samples for backup) the creation of a 'Hello World' application. We will write a simple proto file, generate code from it and start it as a service and query the service using an open source tool. We will also demonstrate how quick someone might create a client for the gRPC service.

  • Production Considerations: We will go over the most important considerations when deciding to use gRPC in production. Such as build tooling, testing, deployment and load management considerations.

  • Q&A: Time allowing will open the floor to questions that people might have

Video

Presented by: