REST and gRPC

Most model-serving frameworks are based on REST. TensorFlow Serving and TensorRT offer gRPC endpoints which are fussier but more performant.

Benefits of REST

• Stateless - No client context is stored on the server between requests

• Self-contained - All information that is needed to service a request is packaged with the request itself

• Flexible - REST is programming language agnostic, has universal browser and language support, and supports a large number of filetypes

Benefits of gRPC

• Bi-directional - gRCP supports two-way communication

• Simplicity - No headers, methods, or body, and better status codes

• Performant - Binary data via protocol buffers for serializing structure data, performs better under high loads