gRPC APIs
Contract-first RPC, generated clients and protobuf compatibility rules.
3 to work through
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intermediate Multiple choice
A real-time platform uses gRPC internally and REST externally. Where exactly should the boundary sit, and what belongs at the translation layer?
2 min answer -
advanced
A gRPC client fleet calls a backend behind a layer-4 load balancer. After scaling the backend from 10 to 40 pods, the original 10 carry almost all the traffic and the new pods sit idle. Separately, calls have started failing with UNAVAILABLE after quiet periods. Diagnose both.
3 min answer -
advanced
You must remove a field from a protobuf message used by dozens of deployed services. Walk through the safe sequence.
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Connection Pinning
The traffic imbalance that appears when a layer-4 balancer distributes long-lived multiplexed connections instead of requests, so new backend capacit…
practicegRPC API Design
Designing service interfaces in a schema-first binary protocol — where the discipline differs from REST and where the mistakes are permanent.
conceptgRPC Status Codes
A fixed set of codes that classify failures and tell a client whether retrying is appropriate.
Neighbouring topics
API & Integration
General material on integrating systems through contracts.
REST Design
Resources, uniform methods, status codes and statelessness.
GraphQL
Client-specified queries, N+1 resolution and query-cost control.
Webhooks
Push callbacks, signature verification, ordering and at-least-once delivery.
API Versioning
URL, header and account-pinned versioning, and who carries the burden.
Backward Compatibility
Which changes are safe, and how to make breakage a build failure.
Contract Testing
Verifying what consumers actually rely on, without a shared environment.
API Documentation
OpenAPI as a machine-checked contract rather than as prose.
Rate Limiting
Algorithms, shared counters, and signalling rejection properly.
Idempotency Keys
Client-generated keys stored atomically with the operation they guard.
Pagination & Filtering
Offset versus cursor, stable ordering and unbounded result sets.
API Error Handling
Error shapes, retryability signals and machine-readable causes.
Event-Driven Integration
Publishing facts rather than commands, and versioning event schemas.
Message Formats
JSON, Protobuf, Avro — schema evolution and payload economics.
Schema Registry
Enforcing compatibility on events the way CI enforces it on code.
Integration Patterns
Routers, translators, splitters, aggregators and dead letter channels.
Legacy Integration
Reaching systems that cannot change, without importing their model.
Partner & B2B Integration
External contracts, onboarding, sandboxes and long deprecation windows.
APIs as Products
Ownership, lifecycle, deprecation policy and developer experience.