What is gRPC?

gRPC is an open-source, high-performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework developed by Google and now hosted under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It allows a client to call methods on a remote server as if they were local functions, handling the underlying network communication, serialization, and transport automatically. gRPC uses Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) as its Interface Definition Language (IDL) and wire format, and runs over HTTP/2 for transport. It supports bidirectional streaming, strong typing, code generation in 11+ languages, and built-in features like authentication, load balancing, and deadline propagation. It is widely used for microservice-to-microservice communication where performance and type safety are critical.