Comment by jauntywundrkind
1 day ago
I super dug the talk Building SpiceDB: A gRPC-First Database - Jimmy Zelinskie, authzed which is about a high-performance auth system, which talks to this. https://youtu.be/1PiknT36218
It's a 4-tier arhcitecture (clients - front end service - query service - database) auth system, and all communication is over grpc (except to the database). Jimmy talks about the advantages of having a very clear contract between systems.
There's a ton of really great nitty gritty detail about being super fast with gRPC. https://github.com/planetscale/vtprotobuf for statical-size allocating protobuf rather than slow reflection-based dynamic size. Upcoming memory pooling work to avoid allocations at all. Tons of advantages for observability right out of the box. It's subtle but I also get the impression most gRPC stubs are miserably bad, that Authzed had to go long and far to get away from a lot of gRPC tarpits.
This is one of my favorite talks from 2024, and strongly sold me.on how viable gRPC is for internal services. Even if I were doing local multi-process stuff, I would definitely consider gRPC after this talk. The structure & clarity & observability are huge wins, and the performance can be really good if you need it.
https://youtu.be/1PiknT36218#t=12m 12min is the internal cluster details.
Thank you! That really means a lot!
>It's subtle but I also get the impression most gRPC stubs are miserably bad, that Authzed had to go long and far to get away from a lot of gRPC tarpits.
They aren't terrible, but they also aren't a user experience you want to deliver directly to your customers.