Google Contributes gRPC Framework to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Google announced that it is donating gRPC, its high-performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF is already the open-source home of the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration tool and similar projects that all aim to bring software containers and microservices to the mainstream. GRPC is the sixth project in the CNCF portfolio.

At its most basic, the idea behind an RPC framework, like gRPC or Apache Thrift, is to allow an application to access code (and the results from running it) in another application that either runs on the same machine or on a remote server. That’s not all that different from an REST API, of course, but the conceptual difference is that an RPC request is more focused on kicking off remote code (similar to a function in a programming languages), while REST calls focus on resources.