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

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned that TLS is used for securing HTTP endpoints, including the HTTP/2 endpoints used by gRPC. This is achieved with the use of HTTPS, which is enabled by digital security certificates.

You have learned that in order for the certificates to work, they need to be trusted by both the server and the client machines. Typically, this will be achieved by getting the certificate signed by a CA. However, it can also be achieved by explicitly marking the certificate as trusted on the machine.

You have learned that there are several tools that you can use to generate and trust certificates. These include PowerShell (which is Windows-only) and OpenSSL (which is OS-independent). We also discussed the dotnet dev-certs tool, which is available with the dotnet CLI. This is simpler to use than other tools, but it's not suitable for all scenarios.

You have also learned that security certificates aren't used only on the server side – they...