gRPC provides an entire framework for RPCs based on HTTP and utilizing Google’s protocol buffer format, a binary format that can convert into JSON but provides both a schema and, in many cases, a 10x performance improvement over JSON.

There are other formats in this space, such as Apache’s Thrift, Cap’n Proto, and Google’s FlatBuffers. However, these are not as popular and well supported, or satisfy a particular niche, while also being hard to use.

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