intermediate · styles

REST or gRPC for This Service?

A team is building a new service API and asks: REST or gRPC? What do you ask them before answering?

Practical scenario

A payments team is splitting a monolith and must expose balance and transfer operations to three internal services today, with a partner API “sometime next year”.

What it tests

  • • Whether the candidate interrogates the consumer environment before choosing a style
  • • Concrete knowledge of what each style buys and costs
  • • Awareness of browser and tooling constraints