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 must not modify existing fields in future Protobuf versions

Protobuf doesn't prevent you from changing data types on your fields. But not all data types are compatible with each other. If you change the data type of just one of your fields to a data type that isn't compatible with it, you will make your whole interface incompatible with the existing clients.

In the following list, each bullet contains the data types that can be interchanged with each other:

  • int32, uint32, int64, uint64, and bool
  • int32, uint32, int64, uint64, and enum values
  • sint32 and sint64
  • string and bytes, but only if the bytes value uses UTF-8 encoding
  • fixed32 and sfixed32
  • fixed64 and sfixed64

However, just because you can change the data type of a field, it doesn't mean that you should. For example, what would happen if you sent a negative value as int32, but consumed it as a positive-only uint32 data type on the other side? The original value cannot...