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

Using special keywords in Protobuf

Protobuf has a range of special keywords that we haven't covered so far. Some of them are only used on rare occasions. For example, you may have to use special keywords to make your proto files compatible with an older version of Protobuf. We will not cover those in this chapter.

There are also some other Protobuf features that are only useful in a very narrow range of circumstances, such as using extensions and defining custom options. These will not be covered either due to their limited usefulness.

However, there are also some keywords that are very useful and accessible. The most prominent of them are oneof and option. These are the keywords that we will focus on now.

How the oneof keyword can make communication more efficient

Inside the greet.proto file, we will modify the BasicTypes message definition. First, we will replace the fields with the sequence numbers from 1 to 10 with the following:

oneof whole_number_field {
...