Depends whether you consider Google Cloud internal to Google.

even google cloud is not very dependent on gRPC

as far as I remember most of the API is built on REST

"Not very dependent" is subjective. The objective relevant take is it is a required dependency of parts of officially supported APIs of major GCP services that have large paid customers with SLAs. It can't go away anytime soon.

Google may have Stubby as the primary internal RPC, but several other large companies rely primarily on gRPC and have contribute to it and have incentives to keep it alive, e.g. Dropbox, Netflix, even parts of Apple and Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft's support of gRPC in C#/.NET is arguably more first-class and polished than any other language.

Fair enough

Although this might have some external implications, most of GCP does not rely on gRPC, even the external customers are not usually dependent on gRPC when using Google services.

Correct me if I'm wrong but gcloud uses REST and so do the libraries google publishes for using GCP apis in different languages.

The question is can Google stop supporting gRPC, protobuf or stubby tomorrow, and I still think gRPC is relatively at risk

> so do the libraries google publishes for using GCP apis in different languages

Not true. Many Google Cloud client libraries do support gRPC.

> still think gRPC is relatively at risk

I would agree with you that relative to protobuf and stubby, gRPC is less critical to Google infra. Yet, in absolute terms I would put the probability of that happening for any of those in the next couple decades at zero.

you are right, I checked now and these are based on gRPC

for some reason I remembered these used REST

That info is a bit outdated. All but the oldest APIs (most notably GCE) support gRPC out of the box.

For newer services, there is an automatic 1:1 mapping between the REST and gRPC APIs, except for features like streaming RPCs which have no REST equivalent.

It supports gRPC but that's not the commonly used flow, even by google cloud actual UI

The REST apis are converted to stubby internally, not gRPC which what makes it relatively disposable

The argument that gRPC is disposable because everything is stubby internally applies equally to REST. And I don't think anyone is arguing that REST is disposable.

I'm not sure what part of GCP you work in, but in my experience, the big customers are using gRPC, not REST.

It isn't.