gRPC Conf 2025

Services often require contextual metadata that is ancillary to the active request including session information, routing strategies, failure testing, and many other use cases. Managing and transmitting this data across a wide ecosystem presents lots of difficulties coordinating the schema and responsibilities. Come learn how Netflix manages and shares contextual data across our deep and complex set of microservices to make various business decisions. These services include not only gRPC but also REST across various programming languages.

We will discuss first and foremost what contextual metadata is. This includes our utilization of protobuf to define and model strict relationships in a highly structured polyglot ecosystem. Then we will expand on how we propagate that data across different IPC transport frameworks, particularly using gRPC metadata headers. We will finish with lessons learned and how we effectively scale, manage and observe this system.