gRPC: A nice way for micro-services chat-chat

Introduction

Laymen explanation

If you worked to convert monolithic software application to micro-service architecture, you must have felt that it is like breaking down processes and labelling as a service. Now many obvious becomes non-obvious for you in this work. Now you can't using IPC the way you did earlier. If you loved using RPC call, you are in fix. Moreover, . If you faced issue anytime that firewall drops the packet, you must be willing to avoid any firewall specific trouble. You wish to find less friction based migration. In fact, you may want following.

• • RPC based communication which works on internet

  • Avoid any firewall specific trouble

Moreover, you will love to have following additional stuffs

• • For writing micro-services and chit-chat among them, you will wish freedom to use programming language of your own choice

  • Chit-chat should not be performance bottleneck.

This article helps in this regard.

Technical explanation

In a monolithic application, function calls are used to communicate between different functions to a single process. With microservices, these functions are broken into different processes and they need an effective way to communicate with each other. These processes communicate over the network. Google then facilitates the process of communicating effectively over the network internally as an effective way to handle Remote Procedure Calls, open-sourced as gRPC.

gRPC can be summarized as protocol buffers running over HTTP/2 with multiple programming language support.

Elements of gRPC

Protocol buffers

HTTP/2

Multiple language support

Design evaluation

Lets revisit questions

• • RPC based communication which works on internet

    • gRPC protocol buffer is designed for the same

  • Avoid any firewall specific trouble

    • HTTP standard port use helps in this regard

  • For writing micro-services and chit-chat among them, you will wish freedom to use programming language of your own choice

    • Multiple language support helps in this regard

  • Chit-chat should not be performance bottleneck.

    • HTTP/2 helps in this regard

REST versus RPC

The difference between REST and RPC is really quite simple — REST exposes data as resources to be acted upon, whereas RPC exposes operations as a method for acting upon data.

Reference

https://nordicapis.com/exploring-the-grpc-framework-for-building-microservices/

https://www.weave.works/blog/scalable-microservices-grpc-kubernetes-docker/