Case Study: Netflix boosts developer productivity and cuts latency with CNCF gRPC

How Netflix increased developer productivity and defeated the thundering herd with gRPC

Netflix, a leading streaming media company, faced challenges with its custom HTTP/1.1 interservice communication stack, which had become a bottleneck for developer productivity and scalability. The handwritten client code was time-consuming, error-prone, and lacked a clear way to describe APIs, making them difficult to discover and audit. The company turned to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's gRPC framework for a new solution.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's gRPC solution provided a high-performance RPC framework that connected services across languages. By implementing gRPC, Netflix replaced hundreds of lines of custom code with a few lines of configuration, slashing the time to create a client from weeks to minutes. This dramatically improved developer productivity, reduced time to market by orders of magnitude, and significantly lowered latency and operational errors.

Netflix

Tim Bozarth

Director of Platform Engineering