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I worked on a few fairly prominent efforts in open source (Istio, OpenAPI), but I think of all of them, it’s gRPC that I think has the coolest story. Pull up a chair and set for a spell (any inaccuracies in what follows are 100% my fault for having a bad memory!).

At the time, it was probably one of the most high performance, high scale API proxy in the world. Handling over 1M qps (as we called requests per second internally) for a couple of hundred APIs, 90th %ile latency of around 8ms. It was really, really high performance and a fun team to work on.

Everything from Maps to Drive to Translate ran APIs on that infrastructure, which handled all authn/authz, logging, API key and OAuth token infra, routing, protocol translation (JSON/REST to Stubby), etc. And we were pretty proud of what it could handle.

For those types of APIs, that 8 extra ms (and a hop through the proxy) were well within a tolerable latency budget. After all: when you’re loading a map on your mobile device, translating a phrase into Spanish, or fetching a Google Doc, 8ms won’t even be noticed.