On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 6:49 AM James Roper <[email protected]> wrote:

> I don't understand why people say gRPC doesn't work over HTTP/1.1.


Take a look at an old response of mine on this list:
https://groups.google.com/g/grpc-io/c/Jk6-E3Ezb2g/m/mhimOU7RHksJ . You are
correct that the gRPC protocol only needs HTTP/1.1 semantics.

The upshot of all this is you should never do gRPC over HTTP/1.1 over
> networks and with client, server and proxy implementations that you are not
> in complete control of, such as over Internet. But for internal
> communication in data centres, where you control your exact network
> topology, and you control the client, server and any proxy server that may
> be in the communication path, there's no reason why gRPC can't work over
> HTTP/1.1. So, why say it doesn't?
>

If you have such control over the environment, why use HTTP/1.1 instead of
HTTP/2? It is essentially the "same" work to make sure HTTP/2 works as it
is to make sure HTTP/1.1 works. It is definitely true that our gRPC
implementations don't support HTTP/1.1, so it literally doesn't work. If
you have some reason you want HTTP/1.1, then you probably also have one of
those implementation limitations that prevents it from working well.

I'll note also that we generally design for encrypted connections (TLS);
that makes HTTP/1.1 much more expensive.

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