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> gRPC/protobuf has a lower operational cost than JSON as long as you don't need to talk to it from a browser. So, reading this the other way (browsers are kin

• mumblemumble 5y ago
  Browsers are king for some people, not others. For the stuff I'm working on, the browser is just the tip of the iceberg. For everything below the waterline, the operational benefits (strong static typing, well-defined backward- and forward-compatibility semantics, better throughput and latency characteristics) greatly outweigh the, "but we have to use a lightweight Envoy reverse proxy to expose some things to the browser," problem. I also have a tendency to consider that Envoy proxy to be more of a feature than a bug, anyway. It's pretty easy to set up, all told. We want to gatekeep the edge, anyway, for various reasons, so it's not like there was ever a reality in which we weren't going to be fussing with a reverse proxy. And it serves as a nice opportunity to stop and be thoughtful about exactly what we're choosing to expose to the Internet. Speaking purely as a developer, I do find it to be an annoyance. But I also acknowledge that inconveniencing developers for the sake of the greater good can be a wise move.
• bob_roberts 5y ago
  For a cloud-based app, that might literally just be at the application gateway. Beyond that, everything could be whatever protocol.