From the article: "This is a very nice advantage of gRPC in comparison to REST, which only supports unary requests."
You're right that files can be streamed and it does say that, but additionally there's no reason why messages can't be streamed down an open connection.
Out of interest, as I hadn't considered middlebox support, what sort of things do you find becomes problematic? Doesn't TLS mitigate that? Or are you thinking of niche environments like companies that require intercepting all traffic on their networks? I realise those use-cases do exist, but they're pretty uncommon now as more people realise they're terrible security practice.
Oh fair enough. I guess that's true, although I'm not sure I'd see too much of a problem there. For load balancers there are options that work fine with gRPC, similarly API gateways. Caches and CDNs no (at least I haven't seen any), but then again, I'm skeptical about putting CDNs in front of business logic, and would only ever use them for actual content (where the serving logic doesn't matter). Even logged out usage of APIs still often has analytics and other stuff that means you want to hit the backend every time.
You're right that files can be streamed and it does say that, but additionally there's no reason why messages can't be streamed down an open connection.
Out of interest, as I hadn't considered middlebox support, what sort of things do you find becomes problematic? Doesn't TLS mitigate that? Or are you thinking of niche environments like companies that require intercepting all traffic on their networks? I realise those use-cases do exist, but they're pretty uncommon now as more people realise they're terrible security practice.