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, we learned how to set up both the gRPC client and the server. We did so by manually adding gRPC capabilities to our .NET projects instead of creating new projects from the gRPC template. For our server, we started with a standard ASP.NET Core project template, while our client used the most basic Console Application template.

We had a look at how the gRPC compiler generates code from Protobuf files and how that auto-generated code is affected by changes that are made to the content of those files.

Finally, we covered the process of sharing the same proto file between different applications via a shared class library so that you, as a developer, would not accidentally apply incompatible Protobuf definitions to your client and the server.

In the next chapter, we will have a more detailed look at the use cases of gRPC. Although it's a great communication protocol, it has its limitations, and it's not the best solution for every situation. So, you will learn when it's best to use gRPC and when alternative solutions might be better.