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

Designing Effective APIs

While gRPC is performant, it is easy to make mistakes that will cost you in the long term or at scale. In this chapter, we are going to see the considerations that are important in order to design efficient APIs in gRPC. Since we are talking about API design, the considerations are going to be linked to Protobuf because, as you know by now, we define our types and endpoints in Protobuf.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

  • How to choose the right integer type
  • Understanding the impact of field tags on the size of serialized data
  • How to use field masks to solve the over-fetching problem
  • Understanding how repeated fields can lead to a bigger payload than expected