Adopting gRPC for Low Latency, High Bandwidth Scenarios - Christopher Cifra, Emerson

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 Adopting gRPC for Low Latency, High Bandwidth Scenarios - Christopher Cifra, Emerson gRPC is highly performant and easy to adopt, but in test and measurement environments it can hit latency and throughput limits caused by standard framing overheads and memory copies. This talk presents an architecture for accelerating gRPC without changing application APIs or protobuf contracts. It will cover a method where standard gRPC negotiates capabilities, then transparently upgrades eligible traffic to lower-latency transports, for example, shared memory on the same host or RDMA network paths across hosts. These methods enable sub 10us round trips and zero copy buffers. The session will cover support for unary and streaming calls, capability signaling, zero-copy buffer handling, and safe fallback to standard gRPC when low latency paths are unavailable. The presentation will cover practical design patterns and tradeoffs than can be applied to build faster, portable, and maintainable low latency gRPC systems.