Whether to adopt gRPC

My team was building a new system, where my lead developer suggested to use gRPC as the inter-service communication mechanism.

gRPC is a fine and mature technology, but within our organization, my team would be the trailblazer.

To come down to a decision, here is the pros and cons analysis.

Pros:

• opportunity for the team to learn something new
• advantage of the technology itself, including the performance (using binary over text and http/2 multiplexing)

Cons:

• Tooling support at the company
• in-house expertise
• developer ramp-up time

Personally, the tooling support is the biggest concern. Developer productivity may be ok given the seniority of the team. I don’t see the need of performance yet, especially not knowing the detail well enough. As a manager, I would vote NO.

That said, the key is if I am the right decision maker and what the guiding principal is, which is up for another discussion. Stay tuned.