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.

A binary protocol is a protocol which is intended or expected to be read by a machine rather than a human being, as opposed to a plain text protocol such as IRC, SMTP, or HTTP. Binary protocols have the advantage of terseness, which translates into speed of transmission and interpretation.

Join Katharina Probst, Engineering Manager @Netflix and host of the Next Gen APIs track, as she invites a panel of speakers to answer any and all questions on implementing and maintaining binary protocols (such as gRPC).