I'm surprised many people don't understand your comment - I had the same thoughts. gRPC provides a very nice way to describe event driven microservices using their "stream" keyword. It allows the implementation to be async, blocking, or future based. You get access to a very rich ecosystem such as bazel's grpc \ proto rules, junit rules, grpc-web for streaming to the browser, out of the box support from istio / envoy, etc.

You're right. My fault here. It should actually be possible to define a gRPC streaming API (never tried). The only missing thing for me is the protobuf compatibility though.

Looks like Akka Cluster for rust?

I'm surprised that the overall sentiment of the comments indicates that gcloud's offerings are inferior to aws / azure. I've worked with all of the clouds and have found Google to have the best product. Their GKE with built in Istio support is a killer feature. Spanner is best in class. Competitors do not provide a useable alternative to Firestore realtime database. Pizza Hut is the most popular pizza in the USA, doesn't mean it's the best.

Endorsed. If GCP goes away, I'll be sad to see it, because the tech itself is great. Google don't necessarily have to be the ones running it, maybe. Perhaps another bigcorp could acquire GCP from Google?

Bigquery is excellent too

BigQuery is by far their killer app. Every place Ive interviewed for or worked with that uses GCP uses it mainly for BigQuery.

Dataflow and Cloud Run are likely to be up there soon.

Look into Bazel, so far it has been a dream.

You can use apache ignite as a caching layer over your db. (Or as a db itself). You can then register a ContinuousQuery to listen for changes. A grpc service can be stood up to stream these changes to other clients, even front end ones (via grpc-web).