This transcript captures the opening remarks and welcome address by Kevin Nilson, MC and Program Chair, at GRPC Conf. The address celebrates GRPC's 11th year of continued relevance and growth, highlighting significant community engagement, upcoming features like early access Rust support, and the project's pursuit of CNCF graduation, the highest level of maturity. Nilson acknowledges key sponsors (Google Cloud, CNCF) and committees, provides an overview of new developer resources, and showcases impressive download statistics, emphasizing GRPC's sustained adoption and evolution in the cloud-native ecosystem.
GRPC Conf: Welcome and Key Updates
0:00 Welcome & Conference Legacy: Kevin Nilson, MC and Program Chair, kicked off the GRPC Conf, celebrating its 11th year and featuring talks from major companies such as Apple, Cloudflare, Mastercard, Netflix, and LinkedIn.
2:43 Expanding Language Support with Rust: A significant announcement was the introduction of early access support for Rust, a highly requested feature from the community, which includes previews and dedicated code labs. A poll showed strong polyglot adoption, with most attendees using gRPC in multiple languages.
4:01 Key Acknowledgments & CNCF Graduation: Google Cloud was recognized as a diamond sponsor, providing the venue and amenities, and the CNCF for its substantial support. gRPC is in the final stages of applying for CNCF "Graduated" status, the highest maturity level, a process facilitated by a complete rewrite of the project's governance.
7:27 Community Contributions: Notable community members, including Lucio Franco for his Rust implementation contributions and Antoine from Data Dog for his major work on the Go codebase (earning him a maintainer promotion), were acknowledged.
8:10 Enhanced Developer Resources: Significant improvements based on user feedback include six new user guides, fresh examples, and easier-to-consume code labs (including for Rust), which were available throughout the day. Key online resources (grpc.io, Google Group, YouTube, Meetups, X/Twitter) were also highlighted.
10:32 Continuous Growth and Adoption: A growth chart of the main gRPC repository showcased continuous growth in relevance and users over its 11 years. Download statistics emphasized widespread adoption, with 7 million weekly downloads on Maven Central, 43 million for Python, and 15 million for NPM, consistently increasing year over year.
11:50 Next Speaker: Rajie, a Senior Director at Google, was introduced as the next speaker, who would present on the current state of gRPC.