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

Using collections in Protobuf

Protobuf supports two types of collections: repeated fields and maps. Repeated fields are analogous to arrays or lists in C#. They represent a collection of singular objects. Maps are analogous to dictionaries in C#. They represent a collection of key-value pairs.

Repeated field collections can contain any data type, but you cannot use additional keywords inside of them. For example, you cannot have an equivalent of a multi-dimensional array by having a repeated keyword inside a repeated field.

Map fields can use any data type as a value, but its key needs to be either any of the integer types or a string. It cannot be a bytes, enum, float, or double data type, or any custom message type. Neither its key, its value, nor the whole field itself can be repeated. Let's discuss each type further in the next subsections.

Repeated fields

Inside the greet.proto file, add the following fields to the NestedMessage definition:

repeated string...