gRPC Conf 2025

This talk explores Cloudflare's multi-year work that helped drive new Internet protocol standards development and large-scale deployment; culminating in work to bring support for gRPC over HTTP/3 to the edge.

QUIC is a transport protocol that offers security and performance advantages compared to TCP and TLS. HTTP/3 defines how QUIC's multiplexed streams can be leveraged to avoid head-of-line blocking issues. Cloudflare launched early support in 2018, and open sourced the quiche Rust library in 2019. With close to 7 years deployment experience, there's lots to share.

We launched support for gRPC over HTTP/2 in 2020. We'll explore how we implemented it within a legacy stack using gRPC-Web conversion, and touch on broader HTTP/2 DoS vulnerabilities that have hit headlines since.

The talk concludes by covering the gRPC over HTTP/3 protocol, implementation details (including testing with h3i), and how our gRPC-Web approach yields seamless version agility for a migration path to HTTP/3.