Key takeaways

• Why we (Spotify) felt compelled to replace our RPC framework with gRPC, what kind of issues we hope to solve and how we go about rolling out gRPC across our fleet of services.
• How do you get 200 autonomous engineering teams to align on something as fundamental and cross-cutting as a new RPC framework? How do you roll-out gRPC at scale whit minimal disruption to both the organization and to the end-user?
• Advanced gRPC concepts such as interceptors, deadlines, and effective schema management.

At Spotify, we have historically built services based on our own proprietary messaging protocol and framework. Last year we finally kicked off the daunting multi-year task of migrating everything to gRPC. Migrating over 1000 services to gRPC poses interesting challenges, many of them are not only technical in nature: they boil down to questions of engineering culture and leadership at scale: How do you get 200 autonomous engineering teams to align on something as fundamental and cross-cutting as a new RPC framework? How do you roll-out gRPC at scale whit minimal disruption to both the organization and to the end-user? This presentation will address these questions alongside more technical discussions of advanced gRPC concepts such as interceptors, deadlines, and effective schema management and how they are essential in large distributed systems.