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

Setting up the authentication backend

There are multiple ways of setting up the authentication backend of your application. It's common to see the user data being stored inside the main application itself. However, this approach is not scalable. The users stored directly inside the application will only be valid within the context of this application. So, if your estate has multiple applications, it will be problematic to authorize all of them with a single login.

An alternative approach is to use a separate authorization provider that all applications will integrate with. This way, when the user logs in, a token is issued to the user that is then stored in the session. Then, this user is free to access any other application until they log out or the token expires due to inactivity. This system is known as SSO.

When you use SSO, your authentication information will not be stored in any of the user-facing applications. Instead, there will be a dedicated application that will...