gRPC Conf 2020: Full Schedule

Virtual Event
July 27–28, 2020

The schedule is subject to change. As we adjust to a virtual experience, our plan is to keep the sessions the same, which is dependent on speaker availability.

Learn More and Register to Attend This Event

Please note that all session times are listed below in Central Daylight Time (CDT), UTC -5.

10:00am CDT

Keynote: Opening Remarks - April Nassi, Program Manager, Google

Speakers

April Nassi

Program Manager, Google

April Kyle Nassi is an Istio and gRPC community manager at Google focused on open source strategy. Previously, she created the Salesforce Developer community program and put on many a Dreamforce DevZone. She’s a CNCF Ambassador, crazy dog lady, and native Texan. You can find her... Read More →

Monday July 27, 2020 10:00am - 10:05am CDT
Keynote Room

Keynote Sessions

10:07am CDT

Keynote: Lessons Learned in Building a gRPC Implementation for .NET Core - Sourabh Shirhatti, Senior Program Manager & John Luo, Software Engineer, Microsoft

John Luo and Sourabh Shirhatti are part of the ASP.NET team at Microsoft working on the .NET Core implementation of gRPC. In this talk, they'll cover their experience in building a new gRPC implementation. They'll start by covering the design and limitations imposed by the existing .NET gRPC library and how the library attempts to address these concerns. As part of this deep dive, they'll also cover some of the design decisions that made in designing an opinionated framework and showcase the productivity and performance benefits introduced by the new library.

Speakers

Sourabh Shirhatti

Program Manager, Microsoft

Sourabh Shirhatti is a Program Manager on the .NET application platform team where he’s worked on the open source framework ASP.NET Core. In addition to contributing to the .NET Core implementation for gRPC, his other area of focus is improving the diagnosability and observability... Read More →

John Luo

Software Engineer, Microsoft

John Luo is a Software Engineer at Microsoft working on the ASP.NET Core team. Previously, he worked on web framework components including caching, HTTP middlewares and HTTP/2 support in Kestrel server. John contributes to the effort to provide a .NET Core gRPC implementation and... Read More →

grpc dotnet copy pdf

Monday July 27, 2020 10:07am - 10:37am CDT
Keynote Room

Keynote Sessions

Experience Level Any (All levels of experience would benefit from this session)

10:39am CDT

Sponsored Keynote: Cheryl Hung, Director of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation & Leonardo Pistone, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Spotify

Speakers

Cheryl Hung

VP Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cheryl Hung is VP Ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where she drives adoption of cloud native infrastructure. As a non-profit under the Linux Foundation, the CNCF hosts open source projects including Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy.She founded the 5000+ strong Cloud... Read More →

Leonardo Pistone

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Spotify

I work in Core Infrastructure at Spotify.

gRPC Conf 2020 Cheryl Hung pdf

Monday July 27, 2020 10:39am - 10:44am CDT
Keynote Room

Keynote Sessions

10:47am CDT

Keynote: A Simplified Service Mesh With gRPC - Srini Polavarapu, Engineering Manager, Google

gRPC is a popular choice for building microservices based applications but it does not have any native service mesh features such as service discovery, load balancing, application security and observability. A service mesh typically provides such features via sidecar proxies deployed alongside the microservices.

In this session, we will introduce the new exciting development of service mesh features in gRPC and show how to bring the benefits of a service mesh to your gRPC applications without the complexity of managing sidecar proxies. We will also talk about the architecture and show how you can go from a proxy based service mesh to a proxy-less service mesh with gRPC.

Speakers

Srini Polavarapu

Engineering Manager, Google

Srini Polavarapu is a technical lead and an engineering manager at Google building service mesh solutions for GCP users. Srini is a gRPC maintainer and leads the gRPC team at Google. Prior to Google, Srini was an architect and an engineering leader at Brocade and Foundry Networks... Read More →

A Simplified Service Mesh with gRPC pdf

Monday July 27, 2020 10:47am - 11:17am CDT
Keynote Room

Keynote Sessions

Experience Level Any (All levels of experience would benefit from this session)

11:20am CDT

Break

Monday July 27, 2020 11:20am - 12:00pm CDT
Anywhere

Breaks

12:00pm CDT

Next Level gRPC With Kotlin and Coroutines - Marco Ferrer, OfferUp

When it comes to async programming on the JVM, Kotlin Coroutines are leading the pack in both versatility and performance. This session will cover how the usage of Coroutines improves the ergonomics of APIs from both a client and server perspective. It will also cover the key benefits gained by adopting the practice of structured concurrency. Attendees will learn how Coroutines enable clients and services to participate in cooperative cancellation across network boundaries. Improving overall resource utilization. See how Coroutine suspension maps naturally to gRPC's backpressure mechanisms. After which we will dive into the state of the gRPC ecosystem for Kotlin. Analyzing what the available options are for current users and what the future has in store for the ecosystem.

Speakers

Marco Ferrer

Foundation Tech Lead, OfferUp

Passionate JVM developer. Community event organizer and speaker. Author of Kroto-plus, a suite of protobuf compiler plugins.

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Monday July 27, 2020 12:00pm - 12:30pm CDT
Session Room 1

Ecosystem, Tooling

Experience Level Any (All levels of experience would benefit from this session)

12:00pm CDT

Protop: A Package Manager for gRPC and Protocol Buffers - Jeffery Shivers, Toast, Inc

This presentation will cover a new open source tool called protop (pronounced “proto p”) which enables developers to easily publish and share protocol buffers across code bases. Protop was created as a lightweight solution for projects that need access to the same protobufs, such as common libraries that span multiple services, or even external gRPC APIs. The tool can be plugged into most pipelines or projects with a minimal footprint, and aims to encourage projects to keep protobuf schemas small, portable, and ultimately separate from their implementations.

We’ll see how protop works through a few real examples and examine how it might help accomplish good development practices in the world of gRPC, especially in collaborative and open-source contexts.

Speakers

Jeffery Shivers

Software Engineer, Toast, Inc

Jeffery Shivers is a software engineer on the Customer Experience Transformation team at Toast, Inc in Boston. He loves rapid prototyping and solving tricky integration challenges across growing systems. Jeffery came from a background of music composition before he became obsessed... Read More →

protop a package manager for protobufs pdf

Monday July 27, 2020 12:00pm - 12:30pm CDT
Session Room 2

Tooling, Ecosystem

Experience Level Any (All levels of experience would benefit from this session)

12:35pm CDT

Real World Migration from HTTP to gRPC in Ruby - Nao Minami, Wantedly, Inc.

As of today we are running about 100 microservices at Wantedly, built with Ruby, Go, Python, Node, and Rust on our production Kubernetes cluster. While we’ve been historically using HTTP/1.1 for majority of inter microservices process communication, since the last year we have started introducing gRPC for some of our microservices which requires low latency and high throughput.

This talk will cover the details of our migration approach and the performance improvement we’ve achieved as a result. Average latency got decreased by 50%, and 90%tile latency was decreased to a seventh. We will discuss our migration steps we’ve took, technical and organizational challenges we’ve faced during the migration, and also tools and libraries we’ve made in order for smooth transitions for servers originally built with Ruby on Rails.

Speakers

Nao Minami

Software Engineer, Wantedly, Inc.

Nao Minami is a lead software engineer at Wantedly, a professional networking platform. He’s been responsible for building one of the most high throughput microservices at the company, and also responsible for gRPC adoption across the organization. He recently enjoys podcasting... Read More →

grpc conf real world migration from http to grpc in ruby nao minami pdf

Monday July 27, 2020 12:35pm - 1:05pm CDT
Session Room 2

gRPC in-production

Experience Level Beginner (Very basic information)

12:35pm CDT

Talking to Go gRPC Services Via HTTP/1 - Malte Isberner, StackRox Inc. & StackRox GmbH

gRPC works perfectly for service-to-service communication in private networks, where a client talks to a server via a direct TCP connection. Things are more complicated if services, users, or CLI tools talk to gRPC servers exposed on the internet, as many of the commonly used application-level load balancers/reverse proxies only support gRPC with additional configuration (e.g., nginx) or not at all (e.g., AWS ELB).
In this session, an approach for communicating with gRPC services through reverse proxies that only support HTTP/1.1 is presented. While the approach comes with some restrictions, it requires next to no changes to both the client and server code, no additional components to be deployed, and ensures maximum compatibility between different client and server setups. Along with the approach, a Go library implementing it will be introduced, demonstrating via code examples and a live demo how this technique can be used as a drop-in replacement in existing Go-based gRPC code.

Speakers

Malte Isberner

Principal Engineer & Managing Director, StackRox Inc. & StackRox GmbH

Malte Isberner is a Principal Engineer at StackRox, where he designs and builds the StackRox Kubernetes Security Platform. He has worked on a broad range of features, from kernel-level collection techniques over tools for simplifying the operationalization of security-relevant features... Read More →

TalkingToGoGRPCviaHTTP1 gRPCConf2020 MalteIsberner pdf

Monday July 27, 2020 12:35pm - 1:05pm CDT
Session Room 1

gRPC in-production, Ecosystem

Experience Level Intermediate (Mid-level experience)

1:10pm CDT

Ask Us Anything: gRPC Maintainers - April Nassi, Louis Wasserman, & Brent Shaffer, Google

Speakers

Louis Wasserman

Software Engineer, Google

I am a software engineer at Google working on the Java Core Libraries Team. I received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. I have interests in functional programming, algorithms, refactoring, and API design.

Brent Shaffer

Developer Programs Engineer, Google

Brent Shaffer is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google who is involved primarily in the Open Source world of PHP and Ruby. His most notable Open Source contribution is the OAuth2 server for PHP, and his favorite OpenSource project is the Symfony framework. Outside of work, he... Read More →

April Nassi

Program Manager, Google

Monday July 27, 2020 1:10pm - 1:40pm CDT
Session Room 2

Ecosystem

1:10pm CDT

Service Interoperability With gRPC - Varun Gupta & Tuhin Kanti Sharma, Salesforce

This session will talk about the need for standardization for service to service communication at Salesforce and a solution that is implemented using gRPC across polyglot systems. We will share the implementation of our framework for Last Known Good [Artifact] service using gRPC. We will discuss how we used Java Spring Boot to implement a gRPC call framework and integrated it with a standard authentication protocol used at Salesforce. We will also share our future plans of moving to reactive streams for our gRPC service in Java.

Speakers

Varun Gupta

VP, Software Engineering, Salesforce

Varun Gupta is currently Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce. Varun's teams work on platforms that deliver path to production services enabling delivery of high quality code to production. Varun personally serves as a technical architect, product line owner and people... Read More →

Tuhin Kanti Sharma

Lead Software Engineer, Salesforce

Tuhin Kanti Sharma is a Technical Lead at Salesforce. Tuhin has developed synthetic monitoring and continuous deployment platforms. These platforms enable thousands of developers at Salesforce, to build their services with high quality and run them reliably. Tuhin has expertise building... Read More →

Service Interoperability with gRPC pdf

Monday July 27, 2020 1:10pm - 1:40pm CDT
Session Room 1

Implementation

Experience Level Any (All levels of experience would benefit from this session)

10:00am CDT

Keynote: Opening Remarks - James Ward, Developer Advocate, Google

Speakers

James Ward

Developer Advocate, Google Cloud

James Ward is a nerd / software developer who shares what he learns with others though presentations, blogs, demos, and code. After over two decades of professional programming, he is now a self-proclaimed Typed Pure Functional Programming zealot but often compromises on his ideals... Read More →

Tuesday July 28, 2020 10:00am - 10:05am CDT
Keynote Room

Keynote Sessions

10:07am CDT

Keynote: Apache Beam Making Big Data Portable With gRPC - Ismaël Mejía, Software Engineer, Talend

Apache Beam is a unified programming model designed to create efficient and portable data processing pipelines. Portability in Apache Beam has two meanings: Users of Apache Beam can run their programs in different execution systems e.g. Apache Spark, Apache Flink, etc and they can choose their favorite (supported) language and be able to execute pipelines even if the targeted execution system does not support the language natively.

In this talk we introduce Beam, its architecture based on translators (runners) and its portability framework: a set of gRPC services to coordinate the execution of functions isolated in language specific environments. The use of gRPC on Beam provides not only clear and easy to evolve contracts to coordinate the execution of functions but it offers nice isolation properties if combined with containers.

Speakers

Ismaël Mejía

Software Engineer, Talend

Software Engineer with more than ten years of experience designing and developing information systems for financial groups, telecom companies and startups. Focused on Big Data and Cloud architectures (aka Distributed Systems). He works at Talend France as an Open Source Software Engineer... Read More →

Apache Beam Making Big Data Portable with gRPC gRPC2020 Ismael Mejia iemejia pdf

Tuesday July 28, 2020 10:07am - 10:37am CDT
Keynote Room

Keynote Sessions

Experience Level Any (All levels of experience would benefit from this session)

10:40am CDT

Keynote: Erin McKean, Docs Advocacy Program Manager, Google Open Source Programs Office

Speakers

Erin McKean

Google Open Source Programs Office, Docs Advocacy Program Manager

Tuesday July 28, 2020 10:40am - 11:10am CDT
Keynote Room

Keynote Sessions

Experience Level Any (All levels of experience would benefit from this session)

11:10am CDT

Break

Tuesday July 28, 2020 11:10am - 11:50am CDT

Breaks

11:50am CDT

Stop Breaking the Proto! Designing for Change in an Microservices World - Ryan Michela, Salesforce

What's worse than having to deploy ten microservices? Having to deploy ten microservices at exactly the same time. When every change is a breaking API change, every deploy is a lockstep deploy.

In this talk we explore techniques and best practices for evolving protobuf contracts without breaking downstream callers. We start by looking at what constitutes a breaking change, and then explore tactical ways to avoid breaking the service contract. Finally, we will dive into proto design patterns that can minimize the need to break our API contracts.

Apply the techniques in this talk and never worry about breaking your downstream API callers again.

Speakers

Ryan Michela

Principal Member of Technical Staff, Salesforce

Ryan Michela is Principal Engineer at Salesforce, where he’s working to integrate the Salesforce ecosystem with microservices. His passions are distributed systems and helping other developers grow. When he’s not digging into the heart of software, Ryan enjoys hiking and exploring... Read More →

Stop Breaking the Proto! pdf

Tuesday July 28, 2020 11:50am - 12:20pm CDT
Session Room 1

gRPC in-production, Implementation

Experience Level Beginner (Very basic information)

11:50am CDT

gRPC and Java Diamond Dependency Conflicts - Tomo Suzuki, Google

As more frameworks integrate with gRPC, the more complex their dependency graphs become. The complexity has caused Java Diamond Dependency conflicts, which often manifest as NoSuchMethodError or NoClassDefFoundError at runtime for gRPC, GAX, and OpenCensus classes. The conflicts degrade productivity of your project as well as your customers’.

In this talk, Tomo will explain the anatomy of Java Diamond Dependency conflicts among gRPC-related libraries. The audience will also learn Google’s best practices for Java libraries and Linkage Checker, a tool that detects dependency conflicts in their Java projects.

Speakers

Tomohiro Suzuki

Senior Software Engineer, Google

Tomo Suzuki is a software engineer in Google New York office. He is part of the “Cloud Java tool” team that focuses on providing open source tools for Java developers to enjoy cloud computing. He received a Master's degree in Computer Science after attending the Graduate School... Read More →

gRPC and Java Diamond Dependency Conflicts pdf

Tuesday July 28, 2020 11:50am - 12:20pm CDT
Session Room 2

Tooling, Ecosystem

Experience Level Intermediate (Mid-level experience)

12:25pm CDT

Challenges and Learnings: Building gRPC Python AsyncIO Stack - Lidi Zheng, Google

One of Python 3’s most significant improvements is AsyncIO -- the official asynchronous library. The split Python asynchronous world now shares a common destination. Although this feature has been asked to integrate with gRPC back in 2015, it never really happened until now.

In this session, we will discuss the challenges of integrating an asynchronous paradigm with gRPC Core, the designs that are tailored to the AsyncIO world, and, most importantly, the collaborations from the open-source community.

Speakers

Lidi Zheng

Software Engineer, Google

Lidi Zheng is a Software Engineer at Google under the Tech Infra Network Systems area. He is an active maintainer of gRPC repo, and mostly contributing to gRPC Python. He focuses on the API design, distributed system and tooling. Prior to Google, he completed his Master degree from... Read More →

Lidi Zheng gRPC Python AsyncIO Stack Shared.pptx pdf

Tuesday July 28, 2020 12:25pm - 12:55pm CDT
Session Room 2

Ecosystem, Tooling

Experience Level Intermediate (Mid-level experience)

1:00pm CDT

Writing REST Services for the gRPC-curious - Johan Brandhorst, Buf

Introducing the gRPC-Gateway, which makes it possible to expose a JSON/REST interface while maintaining many of the benefits of using gRPC.

The first 10 or so minutes will be spent laying the technical ground for the talk by talking about JSON/REST, giving a quick intro into gRPC and [protocol buffers](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/), then introducing the gRPC-Gateway as a way to integrate gRPC into existing architectures with strict JSON/REST interface requirements.

There will then be a live demo showing the power of this workflow by iterating on a simple design. The audience will be able to follow along on their own by cloning the [boilerplate repository](https://github.com/johanbrandhorst/grpc-gateway-boilerplate).

Gradually more complicated topics like PATCH requests, middleware, authentication, working with browser clients, cookies, WebSockets and more will be introduced.

Speakers

Johan Brandhorst

Software Engineer, Buf

Johan grew up and studied in Sweden but has worked in the United Kingdom as a programmer since 2012 at both multinational companies and small startups. He\'s the maintainer of many big open source projects, such as the grpc-gateway and grpc-web. Having started with C/C++, he now spends... Read More →

Writing REST services for the gRPC curious pdf

Tuesday July 28, 2020 1:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Session Room 1

gRPC in-production

Experience Level Intermediate (Mid-level experience)

1:00pm CDT

From WCF to gRPC - Mark Rendle, Gibraltar Software

In 2006, distributed systems meant Service Oriented Architecture, and SOA meant SOAP. Microsoft created the closed-source, platform-specific Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to enable .NET developers to build SOAP-based applications, services and clients using C# or VB.NET.

15 years later, .NET Core is open source and cross-platform, WCF is being retired, and Microsoft are recommending gRPC as the preferred solution. But can gRPC do everything that WCF did? In this session, Mark Rendle will look at the different modes and bindings of WCF, like two-way "duplex" bindings and server-side sessions, and show how similar functionality can be achieved in gRPC with ASP.NET Core 3.1, with all the performance and interoperability benefits of the gRPC protocol.

Speakers

Mark Rendle

Lead Engineer, Gibraltar Software

Mark Rendle is a software developer and consultant with over 30 years of industry experience, from UNIX to Linux (via Windows). At present he is working on Visual ReCode, a tool to migrate legacy .NET Framework applications to .NET Core. He is a popular speaker at conferences such... Read More →

Tuesday July 28, 2020 1:00pm - 1:30pm CDT
Session Room 2

Tooling, Implementation

Experience Level Intermediate (Mid-level experience)