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 saw how the gRPC communication mechanism is most suitable to be used for direct communication between microservices, as it uses a highly efficient Protobuf messaging protocol over HTTP/2. As well as making synchronous request-response calls, gRPC is capable of asynchronously streaming data both ways between the client and the server.

gRPC cannot work in browsers as it requires HTTP/2, which browsers don't fully support. However, a gRPC-Web implementation has been created specifically to enable gRPC in the browser. However, gRPC-Web still has severe limitations, as it requires many setup steps, is much less efficient than standard gRPC, and doesn't support client-streaming calls.

A good alternative to gRPC-Web for browsers is SignalR, which is already embedded in ASP.NET Core. It supports bi-directional messaging (both singular and streaming) and takes minimal effort to set up.

After reading this chapter, you should know how to apply gRPC...