This might be a dumb question (from someone used to using blocking JBDC) but why is async RPC important in this case? Just trying to understand. And can gRPC not provide good async RPC?
I was referring to the trend of splitting up applications into highly distributed collections of services without addressing the fact that every point where they communicate over the network is a potential point of pathological failure (from blocking to duplicate-delivery etc). This tendency replaces highly reliable network protocols (i.e. the one you use to talk to your RDBMS) with ad hoc and frequently technically shoddy communication patterns, with minimal consideration for how it might fail in complex, distributed ways. While not always done wrong, a lot of microservice-ification efforts are quite hubristic in this area, and suffer for it over the long term.