Architecture · 2015–now · Cloud Scale
gRPC
Binary RPC with contracts. Fast internal glue that should never face the public internet without a gateway.
How gRPC mutated
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
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 · 2012–2023
Microservices Everywhere
Independent deployability as religion. Correct for some; ruinous cargo-cult for most. Consolidation and monolith return are the 2020s epilogue.
$ 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.