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

Chapter 3: Protobuf – the Communication Protocol of gRPC

We briefly covered the structure of a proto file in Chapter 1, Creating a Basic gRPC Application on ASP.NET Core. In Chapter 1, Creating a Basic gRPC Application on ASP.NET Core, we also had a look at the most basic type of remote procedure call (RPC), the unary call, which is equivalent to a standard HTTP request-response call. Then, we briefly covered streaming gRPC calls in Chapter 2, When gRPC Is the Best Tool and When It Isn't.

In this chapter, we will take an in-depth look at Protobuf – the communication protocol that is used by gRPC. We will also cover the structure and the syntax of a proto file.

Although the Protobuf protocol was designed to be as intuitive as possible, it's not always obvious how to use some of its components most optimally. Additionally, some Protobuf features are not very well known, despite their usefulness.

The objective of this chapter is to go through all of the...