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 loosely typed fields in a Protobuf message

So far, we have only used examples of strongly typed Protobuf definitions, which means that, if we have set the data type of any particular field, it cannot just dynamically change to a different data type. Yes, some data types are compatible with each other. For example, you can send an int32 value to an int64 field. But what you can't do is send a string value where int64 is expected.

But there might be cases where you will need the ability to change the data type of a variable depending on the situation. For example, this could be relevant when your system is expected to interoperate with loosely typed programming languages, such as JavaScript or PHP, or schema-less messaging formats, such as JSON.

Even C# has this capability, despite being a strongly typed language. In C#, there is a data type called dynamic. It can change to any data type depending on requirements.

Luckily, this is possible with gRPC too. There are...