Google releases open source gRPC to offer efficient network communication

Google has announced the 1.0 release of its gRPC to provide an upgrade over the existing JSON and deliver efficient network communication. Interestingly, the same RPC (remote procedure call) was intrinsically used by the search giant from the last 15 years.

From the time of its beta release early last year, Google’s gRPC is being used in various open source projects. Companies like Vendasta, Netflix and YikYak in addition to telecom solution providers such as Cisco, Juniper and Arista are utilising the features of this new framework to ease the complexities involve in service contracts, data serialisation, efficient network communication and access control.

“Community interest in gRPC has seen tremendous pick-up from beta to 1.0, and it has been adopted enthusiastically by companies like Netflix to connect microservices at scale,” writes Varun Talwar, product manager at Google, in a blog post.

Open Source gRPC gives network features through HTTP/2 protocol. These includes flow control, header compression and multiplexing requests. Additionally, there is protocol buffers to transmit RPC data. Developers can utilise the multiple language bindings and even install the new offering using a single line code in most of its suported programming languages.

To exemplify the performance of the RPC framework, Google touts that its AI technology TensorFlow is holding its presence for inter-process communication. There is cross-platform support for Linux, Windows, Mac, Android and iOS as well as an API stability for to ease communication.

Developers can experience the features of gRPC for their various production deployments. The latest release supports languages such as C++, Java, Go, Node, Ruby, Python and C#.