KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017

At Indeed, we use an internal framework for interprocess communication called Boxcar. Boxcar was developed in 2010 and provides built-in advantages when used with Indeed’s infrastructure. This framework was originally built as a proof of concept and only targeted Java as a supported language. Due to this limitation, it has not scaled with Indeed’s growth and adoption of more and more languages. Recently, Indeed has started to experiment with gRPC as a replacement for the framework. In this talk, we’ll describe our existing service infrastructure and the changes we made in order to support gRPC. We’ll also discuss the strategy we used to migrate existing Boxcar services over to using gRPC. Finally, we’ll compare benchmarks between Boxcar and the new gRPC-based system. Other technologies mentioned in the talk: linkerd for load balancing, opentracing.