[EdSchouten]

I think it comes to no surprise that sending data through a plain TCP socket is faster than using gRPC. The only downside is that over time requirements will likely start to stack up:

- Suddenly you want to enable TLS between one or more components, meaning you need to wrap the socket inside a TLS channel.

- You discover that your client behaves poorly when servers go offline, so you add your own logic for keepalives/pings.

- At some point you want to add metrics to all of this, so you decide to manually add Prometheus metrics to the client/server.

- Later on you want to attach OAuth2 tokens to requests as well, so that you can do credential passing.

- In order to get more insight in your setup, you decide that you want to use this in combination with OpenTracing/Jaeger.

Once all of those features are added to your Redis-like protocol, you discover that you've basically reinvented gRPC... poorly.

[fulafel]

In the conclusions the author ends up recommending Redis protocol and the plain TCP conclusion is least attractive of all, so I think you and the article are agreement that plain TCP is not the way to go.