REST at the edge, gRPC inside: why internal service calls shouldn't use JSON over HTTP
Franc0Fernand0 · x · 2026-10-02
The 193rd issue of the Polymathic Engineer concludes its API design series with a clear rule: REST for north-south traffic at the edge, gRPC for east-west traffic between your own services.
- What RPC really is: invoking what looks like a regular function that actually runs on another machine, with client stubs hiding the remoteness
- The core argument: an external Booking API justifies REST+JSON readability, but internal calls to payment/notification services at thousands of requests per second pay repeated JSON parsing costs nobody needs when you ship both sides
- gRPC + Protobuf: binary serialization replaces verbose text fields
- Also covers when performance tips the scale, where GraphQL fits, and whether one service can offer both APIs
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