Back at KubeCon North America 2017, many speakers declared that 2018 would be “The Year of the Service Mesh”. Just a year later, in the 2019 CNCF Survey1, it was reported that 18% of surveyed organizations were using a service mesh in production, and by 20202 (the most recent survey published at the time of this writing) that number rose to 27%.

At Torq, we use gRPC as our one and only synchronous communication protocol. Microservices communicate with each other using gRPC, our external API is exposed via gRPC and our frontend application (written using VueJS) uses the gRPC protocol to communicate with our backend services. One of the main strengths of gRPC is the community and the language support. Given some proto files, you can generate a server and a client for most programming languages.