gRPC Essentials: Protocol Buffers and HTTP/2 Explained
Learn how gRPC leverages Protocol buffers and HTTP/2 for efficient, high-performance communication across distributed systems.
We'll cover the following...
gRPC is a high-performance, open-source framework for building remote procedure call (RPC) applications. It uses the protocol buffers (Protobuf) data format for serializing structured data and provides efficient binary communication across different programming languages.
Use of HTTP/2
In gRPC, communication between a client and a server happens over a network connection, typically using HTTP/2 as the underlying protocol. When a client sends a request to a server, the request is sent as an HTTP/2 message to the server, and the server responds with an HTTP/2 message containing the response. So gRPC inherits all the benefits of HTTP/2.
A visual representation of the performance difference between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 makes it clear that 100 API calls in HTTP/1.1 take a whole lot longer.
Let's learn how different versions of HTTP work.
gRPC C# has support for HTTP/3 but it is not available in other languages as of writing this course.
The gRPC framework takes care of marshaling the request and response messages to and from protobuf format, which is a more compact and efficient data format than alternatives like XML or JSON. gRPC supports four types of RPC methods: unary, server streaming, client streaming, ...