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 dates and times in Protobuf

Date and time values are frequently used by software developers. So are data types representing durations. But they are completely missing from Protobuf.

There are some workarounds that can be applied. For example, we can transfer an integer value that represents a number of milliseconds from a specific date. Alternatively, we can construct our own message definitions that store days, months, years, hours, minutes, and seconds. But these workarounds are not necessarily easy to implement. For example, if we choose to represent a date as milliseconds only, there is no guarantee that both the client and the server use the same date as the standard origin. Likewise, if we opt to use a custom message definition, we will need to write additional code to convert it into proper date and time data in both the client and the server applications.

Luckily, Google's library of well-known types has a much better solution for it. It has two data types...