That's really helpful - thank you. It confirms my understanding that it is 
certainly *possible* to expose gRPC externally, and I think it's very 
informative to see Google note so clearly that gRPC "provide better 
performance and usability" than their JSON equivalents.

I wonder if anyone has seen any statistics about the relative adoption of 
gRPC vs REST in the situation where both are exposed, and what that trend 
looks like over time? For example, are there any metrics that say that -- 
for the same API -- X% of calls are REST versus Y% for gRPC? It would be 
fascinating to know how quickly gRPC awareness and adoption are growing.

On Friday, April 7, 2023 at 5:19:44 PM UTC+1 [email protected] wrote:

> Google Cloud APIs are also exposed as gRPC - take a look at 
> https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/overview#supporting_http_and_grpc
>
> There is an API design guide at https://cloud.google.com/apis/design 
> which also covers gRPC APIs. Hope that helps.
>
> On Friday, April 7, 2023 at 1:32:20 AM UTC-7 Chris Lees wrote:
>
>> I'm working on a project which anticipates exposing a gRPC endpoint to 
>> external customers. Most of the online discussion around gRPC focuses on 
>> its use for internal microservices, however, and most examples connect 
>> internal gRPC to external REST to provide the external API piece (often 
>> using a gRPC-gateway <https://grpc-ecosystem.github.io/grpc-gateway/> to 
>> provide this bridge).
>>
>> Aside from the obvious fact that both parties would need to *understand* 
>> gRPC, are there other considerations I should be taking into account when 
>> thinking about an external gRPC API? Is there material online that I 
>> haven't found yet?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>

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