Engineering Notes
Why I Switched from REST to gRPC
REST served us well for years, but as service boundaries increased and payload contracts became stricter, gRPC gave us better guarantees and lower latency.
Where REST started hurting
As endpoints multiplied, we spent more time maintaining response consistency and less time shipping features.
Migration strategy
We moved high-traffic internal endpoints first, generated clients from proto contracts, and kept edge APIs REST-facing for compatibility.
- Instrument baseline latency before migration.
- Preserve idempotency and auth semantics across protocols.
- Roll out by capability, not by team structure.