#19 .NET gRPC - deep dive

With an increasing need for scalability and performance dictated by the modern web, it becomes harder and harder to choose an API paradigm that is suitable for service-to-service communication. While the classical models still work and have their own merits, some of them rely heavily on documentation, extensive coordination between teams or code-sharing. We use shared libraries, and over time our projects become intertwined with dependencies. In these cases, we need something to untangle those and reduce coupling. Welcome gRPC. gRPC has been around for a while and .NET Core 3.0 welcomes it as a first-class citizen. It is contract-based, performant - with smaller response/request bodies, perfect for polyglot environments and supports different models – from client-server to bi-directional streaming out of the box. If we sprinkle some client-side load balancing and the ability of exposing a gRPC service also as a HTTP API we might the perfect point-to-point communication mechanism. In this session, we will deep-dive in how to use gRPC, configure client-side load balancing and gRPC transcoding to streamline communication.