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 binary payloads to decrease the data's size

If you want to minimize a Profobuf message's size while fitting as much data as possible into it, you can convert your data into a binary form. In Protobuf, there is a bytes data type that exists specifically for this.

Even though this data type is represented by the ByteString type from the Google.Protobuf library in C#, there are multiple ways of inserting a standard byte array into the fields of this type, which makes it compatible with any byte-processing functionality available in C#.

Let's have a look at various ways of writing data into this field and reading data from it.

Adding binary fields to Protobuf

In the GrpcDependencies project, open the performance.proto file inside the Protos folder and add the following fields to the PerformanceStatusResponse message definition:

bytes data_load_1 = 5;
bytes data_load_2 = 6;

Now, let's apply some modifications to the PerformanceMonitor class from...