InfoQ Homepage gRPC Content on InfoQ
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From Outages to Order: Netflix’s Approach to Database Resilience with WAL
Netflix uses a Write-Ahead Log (WAL) system to improve data platform resilience, addressing data loss, replication entropy, multi-partition failures, and corruption. WAL decouples producers and consumers, leverages SQS/Kafka with dead-letter queues, and supports delay queues, cross-region replication, and multi-table mutations for high-throughput, consistent, and recoverable database operations.
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Pinterest Unifies Engineering Tools with New Pinconsole Platform
Pinterest has introduced PinConsole, a unified internal developer platform (IDP) that centralizes engineering workflows. Built to address fragmented tools for deployment, monitoring, and service management, PinConsole provides a consistent layer that lets engineers focus on business logic instead of infrastructure complexity.
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Lyft Promotes Best Practices for Collaborative Protocol Buffers Design
Lyft shared its experiences using Protocol Buffers for inter-system integration, primarily focusing on collaborative protocol design for definitions shared between teams and systems. The company promotes approaches that improve knowledge sharing, consistency, and development process quality over raw efficiency optimizations.
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QCon London: gRPC Migration Automation at LinkedIn
At QCon London 2024, Karthik Ramgopal and Min Chen described how AI helped LinkedIn change the remote procedure calls (RPC) protocol for 50,000 production endpoints from Rest.li to Google's gRPC. A planned 2-3 year manual migration turned into an AI-supported migration lasting 2-3 quarters. It changed 20 million lines of code across 2000 services – without business interruption.
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Why LinkedIn chose gRPC+Protobuf over REST+JSON: Q&A with Karthik Ramgopal and Min Chen
LinkedIn announced that it would be moving to gRPC with Protocol Buffers for the inter-service communication in its microservices platform, where previously an open-source Rest.li framework was used with JSON as a primary serialization format. InfoQ contacted Karthik Ramgopal and Min Chen to learn more about the decision and company motivations behind it.
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Cadence 1.0: Uber Releases Its Scalable Workflow Orchestration Platform
Uber released a major version of its workflow orchestration platform named Cadence after six years in development. Uber and other companies use Cadence to build stateful services at scale using native programming languages.
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Akka 22.10 Introduces Projections over gRPC
Akka 22.10 is the first release using the new Business License (BSL) 1.1 release. The Projections over gRPC module is introduced and Java 17 and Scala 3.1 are now supported.
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Netflix Builds a Custom High-Throughput Priority Queue Backed by Redis, Kafka and Elasticsearch
Netflix recently published how it built Timestone, a custom high-throughput, low-latency priority queueing system. They built it using open-source components such as Redis, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink and Elasticsearch. Engineers state that they made Timestone since they could not find an off-the-shelf solution that met all of its requirements.
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Atlassian Exceeds 99.9999% of Availability Using Sidecars and Highly Fault-Tolerant Design
Atlassian recently published how it exceeded 99.9999% of availability with its Tenant Context Service. Atlassian achieved this high availability by implementing highly-autonomous client sidecars, able to proactively shield themselves from complete AWS region failures. Sidecars query multiple services concurrently to accomplish this goal and ensure that requests are entirely isolated internally.
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Cloudflare Report Shows Rapid Growth in API Traffic
Cloudflare has recently released its annual Landscape of API Traffic report. The report analyzes the traffic data harnessed by Cloudflare’s global network to provide insights into the current industry trends of web traffic.
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Google Protocol Buffers Support Idiomatic Kotlin Bindings
Google added support for Kotlin to its open source Protocol Buffers project, which is able to translate a proto definition into an idiomatic Domain Specific Language (DSL) leveraging Kotlin advanced syntax features.
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API Architecture Track Recap from QCon Plus
The API Architecture track at QCon Plus featured six speakers and panelists discussing topics relevant to software engineers and architects who design, build, and maintain APIs. The track covered broad concepts such as extensibility and API lifecycles, and featured a showdown between REST, GraphQL, and gRPC to determine the best technology to use when building an API.
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Practical API Design Using gRPC at Netflix
A two-part series of articles about API design at Netflix was recently published in the company’s technology blog. It describes how they solved the problem of ignoring irrelevant message fields in their backend API requests and responses by using the special Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) message FieldMask.
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Slack Details Its New Role Management Architecture
Slack recently posted a detailed description of the software architecture of its new role management system. Slack needed to build a system that was more flexible than the one it previously had. It created a custom containerized Go-based permission service that integrates with its existing systems over gRPC. As a result, its customers' admins now have granular control over what their users can do.
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Alibaba Cloud Uses Dapr to Support Its Business Growth
In a recent blog post, Sky Ao, a staff engineer at Alibaba Cloud, details how Alibaba Cloud uses the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) to support its business growth. As Alibaba's business rapidly grows while also purchasing other companies, a clear need to support multiple programming languages across varying cloud environments rises. To support this need, Alibaba chose to use Dapr.