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

Securing connections

Up until now, we have not made our connections secure – we used insecure credentials. In gRPC, we can use TLS, mTLS, and ATLS connections. The first uses a one-way authentication where the client can verify the server’s identity. The second one is a two-way communication where the server verifies the client’s identity and the client verifies the server’s. And finally, ATLS is similar to TLS but designed and optimized for Google’s use.

mTLS and ATLS are worth exploring if you are working on smaller-scale communication or working with Google Cloud, respectively. If you are interested in mTLS, you should check the mTLS folder in the grpc-go GitHub repository: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/tree/master/examples/features/encryption/mTLS. And if you want to use ATLS, check out this link: https://grpc.io/docs/languages/go/alts/. However, in our case, we are going to see the most frequently used form of encryption, which is TLS.

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