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

Why you need to reuse a gRPC channel

When you connect the gRPC client to the server, you do so via a configurable channel. When the channel is opened, the following things happen:

  1. A socket is opened
  2. The TCP connection is established
  3. Transport Layer Security (TLS) is negotiated and applied
  4. An HTTP/2 connection is started

Once these steps have been completed, gRPC calls can be made to the server.

Because opening a channel requires all these steps to take place, which represent multiple roundtrips to the server, it's better to reuse the channel while you can. If you already have an existing channel open, you can start making gRPC calls on it right away. However, if you recreate the channel every time you make a call, you will need to perform all these steps every single time. If you need to make many calls, this may slow down your system substantially.

In C#, the gRPC channel is represented by the GrpcChannel class from the Grpc.Net.Client namespace...