How Netflix Leverages gRPC for Resilience at Scale - Olivia Bronstein & Umair Khan, Netflix

Don't miss out! Join us at our next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Salt Lake City, United States (Nov 9–12, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io How Netflix Leverages gRPC for Resilience at Scale - Olivia Bronstein & Umair Khan, Netflix At Netflix, we use gRPC as our primary service-to-service framework, supporting traffic for over a thousand clients and services. To function effectively at this scale demands a rich feature stack that’s built to handle failures gracefully. In this talk, we’ll delve into how we build on top of open source gRPC to deliver key resiliency features: fallbacks for graceful degradation, deadline propagation across IPC transports, hedged requests to trim tail latency, custom request routing for safe traffic experiments, real-time configuration changes with minimal downtime, and how we provide abstractions that let engineers focus on their services rather than boilerplate. You'll walk away with an understanding of how we make gRPC reliable in production at Netflix's scale.