With today's commonplace polyglot architectures, taming service APIs can be challenging. At Lyft, gRPC enforces a common protocol and types to solidify communication between backend services. How can we bring this same consistency to RESTful services and frontends?

In this talk, we will cover how we extended the Protocol Buffer (PB) IDL to create unified APIs and data models. From validation logic to automatic logging and statistics, PBs allow us to speed up development across our Go, Python, and PHP stacks. And where it's not well supported, we will show how we leverage the Envoy proxy to transparently upgrade HTTP/1.1 services to speak gRPC on the wire.