One of the first few things I feel strange about gRPC is that gRPC terminate unfinished request based on a deadline mechanism instead of the more common timeout mechanism. In pseudo-code: var timeout = 5 * time.Second; var deadline = time.Now() + 5 * time.Second; As you can see, the deadline mechanism is less straight-forward at first glance. So why bother? I thought this might be another “Google” thing, so I didn’t put my mind to it until recently.