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Streaming RPCs in both directions (client to server, and server to client) is one big feature. It's not really possible to do client-side streaming with HTTP/1.1, especially if you have proxies in the way. Independently framed messages make it a lot more feasible to implement other important RPC features like flow control too.

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Yeah, it's certainly more compelling than trying to build on HTTP 1.1. The alternative I had in mind was not using HTTP, though (for instance building some custom framed protocol on TCP, or open-sourcing some version of whatever Google uses internally for protobuf RPC.)

a11r pointed out several interesting features of HTTP/2 that are put to good use in gRPC, though.

gRPC is based on the internal Stubby RPC system, and that works over HTTP/1.1 based on CONNECT and switching to raw TCP. That works well enough, but the HTTP/2 goodies are too good to pass up.

Great context, thanks. I'm excited to start using it :)

And using HTTP/2 directly allows using HTTP/2-based load balancers and reverse proxies, which is a huge bonus.

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