Google Cloud Run Service With gRPC Using Spring Boot

Cloud Run + gRPC + Spring Boot

Welcome to another article on Google Cloud Platform. If you are building services using GCP then you might already know the several limitations that come with it. One of them being a lack of support for gRPC in their easy to use solutions such as Google AppEngine (Standard and Flexible), Cloud Functions or in the initial days of Cloud Run.

So if we need to support or have our own gRPC services then we need to use either Google Compute Engine or Google Kubernetes Engine, which is not an easy solution for several small use cases.

An alternate question would be why gRPC? and what benefits does it offer over REST?

If you are new to gRPC, then I highly recommend giving a readout, https://grpc.io. In short,

gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment, efficiently connecting distributed services.

gRPC communication

gRPC offers several benefits over HTTP APIs with JSON, some of them are,

• Strong Contract-based communication
• uses improved HTTP/2 protocol