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

Client-side load balancing with gRPC

Client-side load balancing is similar in principle to the example that we previously looked at. This is where the client decides which server endpoints to connect to. Then, client-side gRPC middleware connects to those endpoints directly.

gRPC .NET libraries have inbuilt components that enable client-side load balancing. But, at the time of writing, those are only available in preview. Therefore, we need to update one of our NuGet packages to a prerelease version.

The caveat is that the specific code implementations may change once the feature is fully released. But even if this happens, the principles of applying it will remain the same.

Updating the NuGet package

All the client-side load balancing components are available in the Grpc.Net.Client NuGet package, but they are only available in the package versions that have a pre-release tag. However, since by default the dotnet CLI command will apply the latest full-release version, we...