gRPC fails quietly when you expect it to roar.

The protocol is fast, compact, and type-safe. It promises seamless communication between services in any language. But in production, pain points emerge. They slow teams, break deployments, and burn time. Knowing these weak spots is the difference between a clean pipeline and a costly rewrite.

Complex Setup
gRPC’s code generation demands exact matching between server and client definitions. One mismatch in proto files can block builds. The tooling is strong, but scattered. Engineers often fight with plugin versions, dependency hell, and outdated docs.

Limited Browser Support
gRPC runs over HTTP/2. Modern browsers don’t fully expose raw HTTP/2 frames. This makes direct browser clients unstable or impossible. Workarounds—like gRPC-Web—add layers that dilute the performance gains and require extra servers.

Distributed Debugging Pain
Debugging gRPC traffic isn’t as simple as dumping JSON. Payloads are binary. Without specialized tooling, inspecting requests or responses in mid-flight slows incident response. Logs show blobs instead of readable data.

Streaming Gotchas
gRPC supports bidirectional streaming. This is powerful, but edge cases are dangerous. Dropped connections can corrupt state. Retry logic is complex and needs careful design. Without this, clients fail silently, leaving partial data in the system.

Inter-service Dependencies
Once a codebase leans on gRPC, changing proto definitions ripples across multiple teams. Deprecation is manual. Backward compatibility must be enforced with strict review. Small mistakes trigger big regressions.

These pain points don’t make gRPC bad. They make it domain-heavy. Success requires automation, observability, and tooling designed for gRPC’s exact rules.

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