Case Study: Salesforce improves interoperability and developer velocity with CNCF gRPC

How gRPC is enabling Salesforce’s unified interoperability strategy

Salesforce, a leader in customer relationship management software, faced a challenge in establishing a unified interoperability strategy across its vast platform. Their previous JSON-based integrations were brittle and required extensive negotiation between teams, making them vulnerable to backwards-incompatible changes. They turned to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's technology, specifically the gRPC framework, to address this.

The solution from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation was to implement gRPC for its built-in backwards compatibility through protocol buffers, which established strong contracts between services. The results included greater flexibility for designing streaming services, improved developer velocity, and a well-defined interoperability layer. The impact was significant, enabling a small team to accomplish a dramatic amount of change with a technology that "just works."

Salesforce

Ryan Michela

Principal Engineer, Service Mesh Team