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 nullable types in Protobuf

Natively, there are no nullable data types in Protobuf. Any primitive non-message data type, such as string or int32, has a default value. The default value will be used if the field hasn't been deliberately set to anything. Therefore, if a field of a particular data type in Protobuf returns its default value, it's not easy to determine whether this value was set deliberately or whether the field hasn't been set to anything at all.

The proto2 version of Protobuf dealt with this option by having the optional keyword. However, this keyword was removed from the proto3 syntax.

Another way of determining whether or not a particular field has been deliberately set is by using a oneof block. For example, such a block may have two fields, one carrying the value we are interested in and one telling us whether this value has been set. If the second field is set, then we know that the original field hasn't been set.

But this solution...