gRPC documentation is thorough on the protocol’s features and sparse on the operational realities of running it at production scale. The gap between the getting-started experience and the production experience is wide enough to have surprised most of the teams that have made the journey. The surprises are not fatal. They are the kind that would have been useful to know before the architecture decision was made.

The gRPC pitch is compelling: Protocol Buffers serialization that is faster and smaller than JSON, HTTP/2 multiplexing that reduces connection overhead, generated client and server stubs that eliminate serialization bugs, strong typing that catches integration errors at compile time rather than runtime. All of these benefits are real. All of them come with operational requirements that the pitch does not emphasize.