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

Summary

In this chapter, we saw the main considerations that we need to take into account when we design our APIs. Most of them were related to Protobuf since it is the interface of our API, and it handles serialization/deserialization. We saw that choosing the right integer type is important and can lead to problems in terms of payload size but also when we want to evolve our API.

After that, we saw that choosing the right field tag is also important. This is due to the fact that tags are serialized along with the data and that they are serialized as varints. So the bigger the tag, the bigger our payload.

Then, we saw how we can leverage FieldMasks to select the data that we need and avoid the over-fetching problem. While this is a concept that is not that developed in gRPC Go, other implementations use that extensively. This significantly reduces the payload that we send across the wire.

And finally, we saw that we need to be careful when using repeated fields in Protobuf...