Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2019

Historically, Indeed has used Boxcar (Indeed’s proprietary framework) to build distributed systems. Over the last year, we have been shifting several of our systems to use gRPC over an Envoy service mesh. While product teams are comfortable adopting the service mesh, the first question they often ask is “How does gRPC compare to Boxcar?”

In this presentation, I put the two frameworks head to head and present the results. I show how my team established some common workloads and gathered metrics to better inform other engineers. We learned a lot about how to tune the gRPC Java library and service mesh when performing this analysis. In closing, I present the lessons that we learned performance tuning gRPC services running over a service mesh and how you can leverage this information for your own services.