even google cloud is not very dependent on gRPC
as far as I remember most of the API is built on REST
as far as I remember most of the API is built on REST
Google may have Stubby as the primary internal RPC, but several other large companies rely primarily on gRPC and have contribute to it and have incentives to keep it alive, e.g. Dropbox, Netflix, even parts of Apple and Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft's support of gRPC in C#/.NET is arguably more first-class and polished than any other language.
Although this might have some external implications, most of GCP does not rely on gRPC, even the external customers are not usually dependent on gRPC when using Google services.
Correct me if I'm wrong but gcloud uses REST and so do the libraries google publishes for using GCP apis in different languages.
The question is can Google stop supporting gRPC, protobuf or stubby tomorrow, and I still think gRPC is relatively at risk
Not true. Many Google Cloud client libraries do support gRPC.
> still think gRPC is relatively at risk
I would agree with you that relative to protobuf and stubby, gRPC is less critical to Google infra. Yet, in absolute terms I would put the probability of that happening for any of those in the next couple decades at zero.
for some reason I remembered these used REST
For newer services, there is an automatic 1:1 mapping between the REST and gRPC APIs, except for features like streaming RPCs which have no REST equivalent.
The REST apis are converted to stubby internally, not gRPC which what makes it relatively disposable
I'm not sure what part of GCP you work in, but in my experience, the big customers are using gRPC, not REST.