I'm speaking tonight at the gRPC Meetup in Sunnyvale. Thanks to Larry and the gRPC team for hosting me!

gRPC isn’t just for internal services! More and more API consumers are getting up to speed using gRPC APIs, and with transcoding and AIP-127, gRPC can be used to build great HTTP/JSON APIs. But most API management products focus on HTTP/JSON APIs and address gRPC as an afterthought (if at all), and gRPC service meshes generally don’t address needs of external consumers like API key issuing and verification.

So what might native gRPC API management look like? For insight, we’ll look at Google, the world’s largest publisher of public gRPC APIs, and Cloud Endpoints, the API management system that Google created for third-party gRPC API producers. It is based on Google’s Service Infrastructure (a set of APIs that Google makes available to external users) and two open source API proxies that are customizations of nginx and Envoy. Everything that we need to know to use and improve this is public, and we’ll look at it in detail and explore ways to build on the open source parts to make something even better.

Tim Burks is a recently-minted Xoogler and worked on both Google’s public API management team (Apigee) and the internal API management team that built Service Infrastructure and Cloud Endpoints. Before joining Google in 2016, Tim spent 8 years building iOS apps and organizing the Silicon Valley iPhone Developers Meetup, and prior to that he built Electronic Design Automation tools at IBM and a Bay Area startup. Tim was in one of the first Computer Engineering classes at Virginia Tech and has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. Outside of tech he enjoys exploring Desi hip hop and traveling around the US looking for good places to inline skate.