Why Buffrs Exists

Modern gRPC based software platforms make extensive use of protocol buffers to define and implement inter-service APIs. While the open-source protocol buffers ecosystem makes it very easy to get started with a few services and a handful of messages, recurring difficulties occur with scaling gRPC APIs beyond immediate repository boundaries for two main reasons:

1. Limited tooling for packaging, publishing, and distributing protocol buffer definitions.
2. The lack of widely-adopted best practices for API decomposition and reuse.

To overcome these problems we developed Buffrs - a package manager for protocol buffers. Using Buffrs, engineers package protocol buffer definitions, publish them to a shared registry, and integrate them seamlessly into their projects using versioned API dependencies and batteries-included build tool integration.

For the practical workflow, continue with the Getting Started guide and the rest of this book.