Architecture · 2015–now · Cloud Scale
gRPC
Binary RPC with contracts. Fast internal glue that should never face the public internet without a gateway.
gRPC mutated internal service meshes while REST kept public APIs debuggable. It stuck where performance and schema matter more than curl demos. The fad was exposing it directly to browsers and wondering why frontend quit.
Case studies
Context
Split everything, then pay for the glue
Hyperscale patterns escaped the companies that needed them. Containers unified packaging; Kubernetes became the cloud OS; microservices and NoSQL were sold as defaults. Mobile-first stuck because screens changed. Cargo-cult distributed systems stuck around as invoices. The durable move was packaging and ops maturity — not rewriting every app into a mesh.
Compare with
Related
Architecture · 2000–now
REST / HTTP APIs
Resources over RPC theater. Won the API wars by being boring enough to debug with curl.
Architecture · 2012–now
Microservices Everywhere
Independent deployability as religion. Correct for some; ruinous cargo-cult for most.
$ Teams split 4-person products into 40 services, then hired SREs to babysit the mesh. Many later consolidated — after years of distributed tracing invoices and on-call trauma. See case studies on premature microservices and big-bang cutovers for named failure modes.
Platform · 2011–now
Apache Kafka
Durable log as nervous system. Event-driven architecture with real operational teeth.