Book Image

gRPC Go for Professionals

By : Clément Jean
Book Image

gRPC Go for Professionals

By: Clément Jean

Overview of this book

In recent years, the popularity of microservice architecture has surged, bringing forth a new set of requirements. Among these, efficient communication between the different services takes center stage, and that's where gRPC shines. This book will take you through creating gRPC servers and clients in an efficient, secure, and scalable way. However, communication is just one aspect of microservices, so this book goes beyond that to show you how to deploy your application on Kubernetes and configure other tools that are needed for making your application more resilient. With these tools at your disposal, you’ll be ready to get started with using gRPC in a microservice architecture. In gRPC Go for Professionals, you'll explore core concepts such as message transmission and the role of Protobuf in serialization and deserialization. Through a step-by-step implementation of a TODO list API, you’ll see the different features of gRPC in action. You’ll then learn different approaches for testing your services and debugging your API endpoints. Finally, you’ll get to grips with deploying the application services via Docker images and Kubernetes.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
10
Epilogue

Protobuf Primer

As we now understand the basic networking concepts behind gRPC, we can touch upon another pillar in the construction of your gRPC APIs. This pillar is Protocol Buffers, more commonly known as Protobuf. It is an important part of the communication process because, as we saw in the previous chapter, every message is encoded into binary, and this is exactly what Protobuf is doing for us in gRPC. In this chapter, the goal is to understand what Protobuf is and why it is needed for high-efficiency communication. Finally, we are going to look at some details concerning the serialization and deserialization of messages.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • Protobuf is an Interface Description Language (IDL)
  • Serialization/deserialization
  • Protobuf versus JSON
  • Encoding details
  • Common types
  • Services