gRPC
gRPC Remote Procedure Call
Situational
Foundation
CNCF (Incubating), Linux Foundation
Since 2015
Judgement: Situational
Right for service-to-service binary RPC; wrong for browser clients.
High-performance, language-agnostic RPC framework built on HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers. Originated at Google, donated to CNCF.
In a data architecture, gRPC shows up wherever services need fast, strongly-typed binary communication — internal service mesh, streaming pipelines, ML model serving.
At a glance
- Category
- Contracts
- Governance
- CNCF (Incubating), Linux Foundation
- Status
- Stable; ubiquitous in cloud-native stacks
- First released
- 2015
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Contracts.
- AsyncAPI — AsyncAPI Specification
- GraphQL
- ODCS — Open Data Contract Standard
- OpenAPI — OpenAPI Specification
- OData — Open Data Protocol (v4)
See gRPC in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare gRPC against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.