Dial Once, Scale Infinitely: Production-Ready gRPC Without the Mess - Aparna Prabhu & Saubhik Singh

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23-26 March, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io Dial Once, Scale Infinitely: Production-Ready gRPC Without the Mess - Aparna Prabhu & Saubhik Singh, DigitalOcean As microservices grow in number, ensuring efficient and reliable communication between them becomes crucial. This talk presents a real world case of building scalable gRPC interactions using reusable client abstractions, type-safe interfaces and a custom internal service discovery mechanism. We'll show how we designed a system where services: - Use a shared client-creator abstraction to centralize gRPC setup - Connect through a custom endpoint discovery service (EDS) for dynamic resolution - Leverage auto-generated typed clients to enforce strict service contracts - Follow a “dial once, use many” model for managing long lived gRPC connections We’ll also go over common pitfalls like calling unimplemented methods or creating redundant dials and share lessons from running this in prod where we rolled it for hundreds of thousands of users. This talk is ideal for backend engineers and platform teams looking to simplify gRPC usage while maintaining strong boundaries and performance.