Chapter 1: Shopee Microservices — Golang, gRPC & API Gateway Foundation
Multi-Language Edition: This chapter is also available in Vietnamese at 📖 Bản tiếng Việt (Vietnamese Edition). Series Hub: Shopee Architecture Masterclass | Next Chapter: Chapter 2 — Flash Sale Engine & Zero Overselling Answer-First: Shopee replaced its monolithic Python/Django backend with high-throughput Golang microservices communicating over ByteDance Kitex / gRPC to eliminate Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) contention and slash memory overhead. By implementing zero-copy Protobuf serialization (vtprotobuf), partitioned Consul service discovery with local agent DNS caching, and bounded worker pools with HTTP/2 and QUIC multiplexing at the API Gateway, Shopee reduced container CPU consumption by 7x while delivering sub-3ms p99 internal RPC latency under 500,000 requests per second. ...