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 not the best tool for browsers

The key reason why gRPC is not the best tool for browsers is that it relies on HTTP/2. While modern browsers support HTTP/2, they don't support all of its features, but some of those unsupported features are precisely the features that gRPC needs.

To work around these limitations, a browser-specific implementation has been developed. This is known as gRPC-Web.

However, even this implementation is not perfect. It comes with the following limitations that, arguably, nullify the utility of gRPC:

  • It requires a proxy to run between the client and the server, converting browser-bound data into a format compatible with HTTP/1.1, increasing the latency and making the payload larger.
  • It does not support client-streaming calls.
  • It requires relaxing cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) policy on the server side, potentially creating security vulnerabilities.
  • Both the client and the server require additional setup steps...