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Intro to gRPC and Protocol Buffers using Go
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Inter-service communication is perhaps one of the fundamental aspects of distributed computing. Almost everything relies on it. Distributed architectures consist of multiple microservices with multiple running instances each. The workloads run long running tasks on virtual or physical servers, containers, or Kubernetes clusters, while simpler tasks are run as serverless functions.
gRPC caters to the scenarios where there is a need for distributed workloads to be tightly coupled — those services which rely on communicating data, and where speed matters. The usual JSON based REST APIs don’t fall short, but if teams are seeking “even more” performance improvements in their distributed and tightly coupled architectures should consider using gRPC instead.
In this blog post, I will not go through the theoretical details of gRPC, and rather focus on the practical example to introduce it to you, especially when you are short on time. The gRPC documentation is a great resource for understanding this technology in detail, otherwise. Topics covered in this post are listed below.
- Introduce the server and client example
- Define interfaces in .proto file
