gRPC moved into Spring Boot 4.1: the new starters, the property renames, and what we measured

Spring Boot 4.1 went GA on 10 June 2026, and its biggest change for service-to-service work is that gRPC support moved into Spring Boot itself. The spring-grpc 1.1.0 release notes state it in a single line: "The main change in 1.1.0 is the migration of autoconfiguration to Spring Boot 4.1.0."

Concretely, the starters you add to a build are now Boot's own:

org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-grpc-server

org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-grpc-client

org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-grpc-server-test