Book Image

Microservices Communication in .NET Using gRPC

By : Fiodar Sazanavets
Book Image

Microservices Communication in .NET Using gRPC

By: Fiodar Sazanavets

Overview of this book

Explore gRPC's capabilities for faster communication between your microservices using the HTTP/2 protocol in this practical guide that shows you how to implement gRPC on the .NET platform. gRPC is one of the most efficient protocols for communication between microservices that is also relatively easy to implement. However, its official documentation is often fragmented and.NET developers might find it difficult to recognize the best way to map between C# data types and fields in gRPC messages. This book will address these concerns and much more. Starting with the fundamentals of gRPC, you'll discover how to use it inside .NET apps. You’ll explore best practices for performance and focus on scaling a gRPC app. Once you're familiar with the inner workings of the different call types that gRPC supports, you'll advance to learning how to secure your gRPC endpoints by applying authentication and authorization. With detailed explanations, this gRPC .NET book will show you how the Protobuf protocol allows you to send messages efficiently by including only the necessary data. You'll never get confused again while translating between C# data types and the ones available in Protobuf. By the end of the book, you’ll have gained practical gRPC knowledge and be able to use it in .NET apps to enable direct communication between microservices.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Basics of gRPC on .NET
5
Section 2: Best Practices of Using gRPC
9
Section 3: In-Depth Look at gRPC on .NET

Why gRPC is a great tool for microservices

gRPC has been primarily developed to facilitate direct real-time communication (RTC) between microservices in a distributed application. Therefore, microservices architecture is where gRPC is often the most convenient tool to use.

To verify this assumption, we will build a solution that resembles a real-life distributed application consisting of microservices, each of which plays a distinct role. Our distributed application will consist of two microservices, as follows:

  • A backend service that manages status information on connected clients
  • A public-facing REpresentational State Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API) gateway that communicates with this service

Both of these will share a Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) definition via a class library.

The status manager service will maintain a collection of key-value pairs representing the client name and its status. Any connected client will be able to perform...