LinkedIn announced that it would be moving to gRPC with Protocol Buffers for the inter-service communication in its microservices platform, where previously an open-source Rest.li framework was used with JSON as a primary serialization format. InfoQ spoke with Karthik Ramgopal, distinguished engineer at LinkedIn, and Min Chen, principal staff engineer at LinkedIn, to learn more about the decision and company motivations behind it. They mentioned that gRPC offers superior capabilities, efficiency, and multi-language support compared to REST with JSON. Additionally, switching from JSON to Protobuf resulted in significant latency and throughput wins. As a result, Rest.li framework is being deprecated and LinkedIn advises users to consider migrating to gRPC.
