[agency]

As an example, they power Google's RPC system (usually referred to as Stubby in the literature, recently open sourced as gRPC http://www.grpc.io/)

[klodolph]

gRPC is based on Stubby: http://www.grpc.io/posts/principles

[ithkuil]

Stubby is based on protobuf; where by "based" I mean layered on, i.e. protobuf is the encoding used by stubby to encode requests and responses.

gRPC is a reimplementation of Stubby suitable to be used outside of Google.

[klodolph]

Yes, I think you are just using a different sense of "based on" than I am. gRPC is based on Stubby in the sense that it is influenced by the design of Stubby and uses the knowledge learned from creating Stubby.