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gRPC: Internet-scale RPC framework is now 1.0
- fsaintjacques 10y agoWhat's missing to get client/server stub in pure C?
- vtalwar 10y agogRPC core libraries for C++ are written in pure C. We need to extend these to use a pure C implementation of Proto and create a C based generated API. We have experimented with this and some users have also tried it. We are looking to add this in future and also welcome contributions.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- the_duke 10y agoAnyone here who tried out gRPC or is using it in production, and can share some experiences?
- jboggan 10y agoI'm not using it outside of Google but I will start for some personal projects with this announcement. I can say that it is one of the best parts of our tech stack and one of the great things about building systems here.
- vtalwar 10y agocaveat: I work in gRPC team. read target blogpost link to get a sense of experience of some of the companies. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/gRPC-a-true-Internet-scale-RPC-framework-is-now-1-and-ready-for-production-deployments.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/gRPC-a-true-Int...
- swah 10y agoThat's the original link! You tricked me :)
- rakoo 10y agoSo gRPC evolved out of Stubby. An excellent show of force would be to announce that Stubby has been internally replaced by gRPC, so that the "gRPC is internet scale" assertion can be more than just a gimmick. Knowing nothing of the first one and very little of the second I imagine it would be some important task, so I have to ask: do you plan to internally run with the stuff you open-sourced ? What is missing ?
- honkhonkpants 10y agogRPC faces a longer road to feature parity with Stubby. For external adopters this is not an issue, so it makes sense that it would be available to the public in advance of its adoption inside Google.
- nostrademons 10y agoBeen a couple years since I worked at Google, but when I was there, Stubby was pretty intimately connected with Google's networking fabric, datacenter hardware, and internal security & auditing needs. None of this is at all useful to external customers - you're not running on Google's proprietary hardware, you don't interface with their monitoring & auditing systems, etc. As an ex-Googler, using gRPC feels just like using Stubby: the interfaces are the same, the serialization code is the same, the only thing different is the networking code and transparent hooks into other systems.
- piran 10y agodocker recently adopted it for its new docker swarm feature.
- justincormack 10y agoWe used it before, for containerd to docker communication.
- manacit 10y agoWe use it heavily on multiple projects across languages, and for the most part it works very well. We've had some pain about sharing proto definitions across languages and keeping them in sync. It's probably a much smaller problem when you've got a company-wide monorepo like Google, but you'll definitely have to be vigilant about your build processes to make sure you have the latest definitions shared. Some of the language bindings (Ruby) started off feeling experimental quality when we began the project, but overall it's been a huge win for us versus HTTP+JSON. I'm sure a non-zero portion of the benefit has been using protobufs at all, but gRPC gives us a great way to generate clients for every language we use without worrying.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoCould you expound upon the problem of keeping your protocol definitions in sync? In my experience this is the strength of protocol buffers: if you follow a few rules, your systems can successfully be decoupled. Some of the rules are never re-using a tag number and never changing a type in an incompatible way (e.g. string->bytes might be ok, but int32->bytes is not).
- teen 10y agoHe's got the same protos checked into multiple projects under different files. They need to be kept in sync
- honkhonkpants 10y agoThat seems like a "doctor it hurts when ... " scenario, and I don't see why it's specific to protobuf. Any IDL managed that way would have the same problem.
- jcrites 10y agoThat problem can be avoided without monorepos. You primarily need a way to declare a dependency from one package on another at build time, such that the appropriate release gets pulled in. For example, maybe you've depended on version 2 of the interface definition; and in that case the build system fetches the artifacts for interface 2 at build time when building the client. Maven for Java works this way. Ideally this system would also allow the package owner to release updates within an existing version if they wish. For example, backward-compatible changes to the service interface can be released while keeping the major version 2. In this way, clients automatically consume safe updates, while incompatible or risky changes can be given a major version bump (e.g. to 3). Consumers who want to pin the interface to a specific version like 2.5.1 could do so, in some build systems, though dependencies this specific are rarely useful or a good idea. In my experience it's best for the contract between producer and consumer to be explicitly versioned at the "major version" level, and only implicitly versioned (meaning updates are automatic) at the minor version level.
- gorset 10y agoWe're using grpc-java in production for some of our based backend system, slowly replacing our old netty/jackson based system using JSON over HTTP/1.1. The performance is good, and it's nice to have proto files with messages and services, which acts both as documentation and a way to generate client and server code. Protobuf is much faster, produces less garbage and is easier to work with than JSON/jackson. The generated stubs are very good and it's easy to switch between blocking and asynchronous requests, which still only require a single tcp/ip connection. We've had two performance problems with it: 1. Connections can die in a somewhat unexpected way. This turned out to be caused by HTTP/2.0 which only allows 1 billion streams over a single connection. Maybe not a common issue, but it hurt us because we had a few processes reaching this limit at the same time, breaking our redundancy. It's easy work around it, and I believe the grpc-java team has plan for a fix that would make this invisible to a single channel. 2. Mixing small/low-latency requests with large/slow requests caused very unstable latency for the low-latency requests. Our current work-around is to start two grpc servers (still within the same java process and sharing the same resources). The difference is huge with 99p going from 22ms to 2.4ms just by using two different ports. Our old code with JSON over HTTP/1.1 implemented using jackson and netty didn't suffer this unstability in latency, so I suspect grpc is doing too much work inside a netty worker or something. I haven't yet tested with grpc-java 1.0, which I see has gotten a few optimization. Still, these have been minor issues, and we're happy so far. The grpc-java team is doing a good job taking care of things, both with code and communication.
- teacup50 10y ago> This turned out to be caused by HTTP/2.0 which only allows 1 billion streams over a single connection. Hilarious. People called this issue out as an obvious flaw when HTTP/2.0 was first proposed, got ignored, and here the issue is. For those unfamiliar: HTTP/2.0 uses an unsigned 31-bit integer to identity individual streams over a connection. Server-initiated streams must use even identifiers. Client-initiated streams must use odd identifiers. Identifiers are not reclaimed once a stream is closed. Once you've initiated (2^31)/2 streams, you've exhausted the identifier pool and there's nothing you can do other than close the connection. For comparison, SSH channels use a 32-bit arbitrary channel identifier, specified by the initiating party, creating an identifier tuple of (peer, channel). Channel identifiers can be re-used after an existing channel with that identifier is closed. As a result, SSH doesn't have this problem, or the need to divide the identifier space into even/odd (server/client) channel space.
- Dobbs 10y agoI'm glad they are releasing version 1.0 but I feel that the maintainers of the Go gRPC team have a lot of work to rebuild trust. I've seen backwards incompatible changes made by core go team members and core gRPC maintainers. Where the API is statically consistent but actually behaves in completely different broken ways. One of these was big enough that I said screw it and am moving that application away from gRPC. I've seen multiple issues where the library you generate against ends up being incompatible with the library you link against at build time. They finally added a version check as part of the build/run step to prevent this from causing silent runtime errors. Maybe in a year gRPC will actually be stable, maybe it has been over the last three months. I don't really know but I gave up, am moving my applications off of it and actively pushing for coworkers to do the same.
- justinsb 10y agoYou should absolutely hold them to this standard, but only now that they have released 1.0.
- atombender 10y ago"Rebuild trust"? This is the first stable release. Every single release before than was called a "Development Release" (and Protobuf 3.0 only came out of beta less than a month ago), so of course they've been breaking things before now.
- IshKebab 10y agoI've used it. It's easy to use and very capable. My favourite feature is that it supports streaming objects, in both directions. In other words you can do an RPC call where the input and/or output is an asynchronous stream of objects. Every RPC system needs this, or you end up with hacks like HTTP long polling. My least favourite feature is that it is tied to HTTP2. I'm not sure what you're supposed to do if you are running on a microcontroller.
- Matthias247 10y agoAgree on this point. The most innovative feature is streaming, which enables some very powerful scenarios. The tying to HTTP/2 and especially the way it is done is also not my cup of tea. E.g. if it wouldn't have chosen to use HTTP trailers (which are mostly unsupported) it could be implemented with a lot more HTTP libraries. It's also sad that it doesn't run in current browsers because of the lack of trailer support as well as streaming responses there. With putting a little bit more thoughts in it (maybe choosing multiple content types/body encodings) this could have been supported - at least for normal request/response communication without streaming. Regarding microcontrollers: It should be possible to implement HTTP/2 and gRPC also on microcontrollers, but imho it will neither be easy nor necessarily a good choice. Implementing HTTP/2 with multiplexing will need quite a lot of RAM on a constrained device, especially with the default values for flow control windows and header compression. You can lower these through SETTINGS frames, but that might kill interoperability with HTTP/2 libraries that don't expect remotes to lower the settings or to reset connections while settings have not been fully negotiated.
- mkawia 10y agoApp engine app's clients use gRPC to connect to datastore , as far as I know
- wslh 10y agoThe last time I tried gRPC with Python in Windows it didn't compile out of the box.
- vtalwar 10y agoIt should work now. We have worked to get python3 work across platforms.
- kpayson64 10y agoWith the 1.0.0 release, there are Windows binaries for all supported Python versions (2.7, 3.4, 3.5). Make sure you upgrade to the latest version of Pip before trying to pip install grpcio. (The binaries use some ABI tags that are only recognized by newer versions of pip)
- wslh 10y agoThanks! it works now.
- arielhn 10y agoWas looking at RPC framework for a project, in the end I went with Apache Thrift since at that time there was no Python 3 support for gRPC [1]. IIRC Thrift also lacks support for my project's Python version (3.5) but at least I can use thriftpy [2]. https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/282 https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/282 https://github.com/eleme/thriftpy https://github.com/eleme/thriftpy
- tokenizerrr 10y agoSo how does service discovery work? Where do I read more?
- talideon 10y agoThat's really an orthogonal concern. You could use Consul, DNS, &c. to do that.
- spullara 10y agoIt isn't really that orthogonal. Just like authentication, things like service discovery, smart clients (with load balancing, retries, etc) should likely be pluggable with some reasonable defaults, otherwise you will be building your own custom stuff on top of it and lose a lot of the value of having a standard. See Finagle for a more complete RPC framework.
- zellyn 10y agoI can speak most directly to Go, where I've been working. You could potentially use one of the maps-to-DNS service discovery systems, although that's limited. At Square, we created a custom balancer (https://godoc.org/google.golang.org/grpc#Balancer https://godoc.org/google.golang.org/grpc#Balancer) which not only handles updates from the service discovery system in order to manage the pool of connections, but also handles which connection to use per-call (so we can do targeting of specific capabilities, datacenters, etc.)
- dleslie 10y ago> Or go straight to Quick Start in the language of your choice: No plain-old-C? That's a shame.
- dang 10y agoCouple discussions from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135347, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114748.
- shanemhansen 10y agoIs "internet scale" the new "web scale"?
- ariwilson 10y ago10s of billions of requests per second sounds like it needs a new term compared to 10s of billions of requests per day.
- packetslave 10y ago"internet scale" is something of a term of art at Google. It's generally used to mean "scales to build systems that do things like 'search the entire contents of the Internet'"
- mkvalor 10y agoAny plans for rust lang bindings?
- vtalwar 10y agowould love community contributions :-). I see some efforts in community but nothing very concrete yet. You can suggest project in gRPC Ecosystem. https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem
- erickt 10y agoOne rust crate that seems fairly well along is https://github.com/stepancheg/grpc-rust https://github.com/stepancheg/grpc-rust. It claims it can communicate with the go client.
- mkvalor 10y agoAny plans for rust lang bindings? (would prefer to avoid FFI to c++)
- erickt 10y agoCheck out https://github.com/stepancheg/grpc-rust https://github.com/stepancheg/grpc-rust. Still in development.
- tptacek 10y agoSomething I've wondered for awhile: why would I want to design with gRPC rather than well-defined HTTP/JSON endpoints? Is it just a perf thing?
- kajecounterhack 10y agoPerformance and versioning are two large benefits. Performance benefit comes from the fact that schema is defined on each side (generally server / server) so you only send the information bytes. With a good RPC system you can also access specific fields of your structure without unpacking (or very fast unpacking, depends on what RPC system you're using). gRPC uses Google's protocol buffers. https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers Comparable systems use other IDLs, e.g Facebook uses Apache Thrift. Versioning is easier because your fields are defined explicitly, so you can ignore clients sending an old field to no ill effect (again, you can access individual fields without unpacking). Whereas with json you need to deserialize first. Also if your schema changes when using json without protobufs, you may experience either the client or the server making the wrong assumptions about input data. Whereas there is no ambiguity with protobufs; future changes to proto messages add fields and old fields can just be marked deprecated. RPC is preferable to JSON for server-to-server communication, but client-server still often uses json just because it's often easier for your client app to interpret json. Systems like gRPC allow servers to emit json as well: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#json https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#j... I've heard of performance-oriented web apps using protobufs on both client and server.
- heavenlyhash 10y agoI'd really love to see something like gRPC implemented over CBOR. CBOR -- Concise Binary Object Notation -- http://cbor.io/ http://cbor.io/ -- is all the performance of a binary protocol, with semantics basically identical to JSON. I appreciate some of the things protobuf does to help you version, but I also do not appreciate the protobuf compiler as a dependency and a hurdle for contributors, or for wire debugging. CBOR has libraries in every major (and most minor) languages and works without a fuss with tiny overhead, both at runtime and in dependency size. It's pretty pleasant to work with.
- gshx 10y agoThis looks very good. At the moment, for the jvm, there are not a lot of features above simply building services using netty and the protobufdecoder/encoder. Similarly, http2 goodness is also already available in netty.
- LeonidBugaev 10y agoI'll try to jump on the plane, and announce that latest GoReplay version now supports Thrift and ProtocolBuffers. So if you are looking to load testing (or integration testing) for gRPC based apps check https://goreplay.org https://goreplay.org
- Xorlev 10y agoUnfortunate that you didn't mention it was a "pro" feature, of which there seems to be no easy way to obtain it. You need a call to action and an automated process.
- ungzd 10y ago> gRPC can help make connecting, operating and debugging distributed systems as easy as making local function calls Oh lol, again
- jadbox 10y agoHow does this compare to something like zeroMQ?
- Spiritus 10y agoI would like to use gRPC, unfortunately the Python driver is incompatible with Gevent[1]. And that's more or less a show stopper for us. [1] https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/4629 https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/4629
- spraak 10y agoCan anyone explain like I'm 5 what an RPC framework is?
- spullara 10y agoYou want to call a method in another process, potentially on another machine. In order to do that you both need to agree on what the networking protocol looks like. gRPC uses HTTP/2 for the control and data channel and uses Protocol Buffers to describe the method call, its parameters and ultimately its return values. Since this is standardized across languages it doesn't matter if the caller is Python and the callee is Java, you can still make the method call.
- hnbroseph 10y agowhenever you hit a json api, that's effectively an RPC call. for example, if you visit: https://api.github.com/repos/grpc/grpc/issues https://api.github.com/repos/grpc/grpc/issues you'll get some json back. what happens is the browser resolves "api.github.com" (via DNS) to an IP address, and then opens a socket connection to that address. then, in accordance with the HTTP protocol it executes a "GET" operation (a notion particular to HTTP), and in response the github server will talk to a database or cache and respond with data appropriate to request. because this sequence of events happens across network boundaries (ie, your browser is talking to something outside your computer), it's often referred to as a "remote" procedure call.
- wanghq 10y agoJSON API != RPC Also the github api is more RESTful than RPC.
- Spiritus 10y agoUgh, why does the Python driver use CamelCase method names? def GetFeature(self, request, context): http://www.grpc.io/docs/tutorials/basic/python.html http://www.grpc.io/docs/tutorials/basic/python.html
- lobster_johnson 10y agoThat's not the driver, that's just the example. However, according to the style guide, camelcase is preferred, and the compiler is supposed to generate language-native names with the correct case [1]. One thing the terrible years of SOAP and WSDL should have taught people is that generated stubs are awful to use if they go against the grain of the host language. [1] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/style https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/style
- elcct 10y agoNot great, but I think it is to match function from the protocol definition. Inside that function you can see "normal" looking python function get_feature.
- raspasov 10y agoCan someone explain how is GRPC significantly better than WebSockets? I have used it for a few weeks and was very underwhelmed by it.
- euyyn 10y agoWhat is your use case, and what issues did you find?
- raspasov 10y agoIncomplete or completely lacking documentation for Objective C and Java, weird bugs, random disconnects. Overall it feels like the Ruby on Rails of networking - an opinionated package/framework that tries to do too much. Also, the whole concept of "as easy as a a local functional call" is a flawed, leaky abstraction.
- euyyn 10y agoI'm responsible for the Objective-C part, so please let me know of anything we can improve there. We have a couple of tutorials at http://www.grpc.io/docs/tutorials/ http://www.grpc.io/docs/tutorials/ and a quick-start guide at http://www.grpc.io/docs/quickstart/objective-c.html http://www.grpc.io/docs/quickstart/objective-c.html . For bugs and connectivity problems, filing a GitHub issue would be super appreciated. If you look at the example code, you'll see that RPCs aren't modeled exactly as local function calls. You're right that that wouldn't work very well. The libraries for all or most languages let you make RPCs asynchronously, without blocking the thread. And all of them provide with ways to write and read RPC metadata (headers and trailers).
- bastijn 10y agoWould it be worth it to use protocol buffers just for the serialization. To replace a current traditional variant. So not for small http communication but for larger persistent storage. Does it help for versioning purposes and preparing for the future when your product might go from traditional to web. Performance aside, it's a clear win there. It seems you have some overhead against in-code solutions (separate .proto files) but it may pay off in versioning and future of your product given all movements to Web etc.
- vigilant 10y agoIs gRPC a full fledged server for API calls? e.g.: Will it have things like monitoring (we've handled x calls to this API in the last hour, the average API call took y milliseconds). Clustering? (a client connects to a list of grpc servers, if one server goes down, the client will automatically connect to the next on the list)? And load balancing? If not, are there existing third party tools to implement these, or is the expectation that the community will create these?
- areed 10y agoNo, these are separate concerns. I use Kubernetes for the latter two.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoAs for monitoring, grpc is hooked into census, which provides some rudimentary statistics and is also intended to eventually exfiltrate Dapper tracing out of Google and into the public gRPC user base. It's a bit rudimentary at the moment, but see https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/src/core/ext/census https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/src/core/ext/census
- lyschoening 10y agoAny people using gRPC and Protocol Buffers from Python with good experiences? The library for Python for one seems very unpythonic to me, starting with all those CamelCase method names. It does not seem possible to use asyncio or any other non-blocking solution on the server. Finally, gRPC obviously only handles the transport: Are there any other useful related Python packages out there for validation etc.?