Kong's 1.3 release introduces native support for managing and proxying gRPC services, enhancing its ability to uniformly handle both REST and gRPC services with the same plugins. gRPC, a remote procedure call framework developed by Google, offers benefits over traditional REST APIs, such as bi-directional streaming and efficient binary encoding. The blog provides a tutorial on setting up Kong to proxy gRPC services, covering two scenarios: a single route matching all gRPC methods and individual routes for specific methods, which allows for more flexible use of plugins. It discusses using tools like gRPCurl and grpcbin for testing and highlights Kong's compatibility with logging and observability plugins, such as File Log and Zipkin. The article also hints at future developments for gRPC support, including native handling of Protobuf data for enhanced plugin compatibility.