Advancing OpenSearch With gRPC and Protobuf at Uber: A High-Performance...

Advancing OpenSearch With gRPC and Protobuf at Uber: A High-Performance API for Modern Search - Karen Xu & Shuyi Zhang, Uber This session explores Uber’s integration of gRPC and Protocol Buffers into OpenSearch, introducing a high-performance, strongly-typed communication layer optimized for modern, cloud-native search workloads. Built on HTTP/2, the gRPC API supports low-latency, efficient communication for indexing and search operations, delivering substantial performance gains over traditional REST-based approaches. Attendees will gain insight into the architecture behind core GRPC services, and how Protobuf enables compact binary serialization and schema enforcement. The talk will also cover ongoing efforts to automatically generate Protobuf definitions from the OpenSearch API specification, ensuring consistency between REST and gRPC interfaces while reducing manual effort and improving maintainability. Practical use cases, integration strategies, and performance benchmarks will demonstrate how gRPC improves throughput, reduces latency, and streamlines inter-service communication at scale. Join this technical deep dive to see how gRPC and Protobuf are shaping the next generation of scalable, modular infrastructure in OpenSearch.