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gRPC for .NET: Creating a gRPC Server Application

While working with Protobuf message format for one of my client projects, I recently came across a gRPC framework. After doing my analysis, gRPC seems pretty promising for inter-service communication, particularly in microservices architectures. gRPC is a language-agnostic, high-performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework. 

gRPC is built on top of the HTTP/2 transport layer and therefore can support four types of gRPC methods (unary, client streaming, server streaming, and bi-directional streaming). It uses Protobuf for message exchange.

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Getting Started With Protobuf Using C# Runtime Library for Protocol Buffers

In one of our client projects, we were using JSON as a default message format for data interchange between various distributed services. We were sending out large amounts and frequently updated data among our distributed services. So, we were evaluating other formats (eg. MessagePack, Protobuf, BSON) to compact message size and improve the performance. After completing our evaluation, we finalized Protobuf as our default message format.

Protobuf is the binary format crafted by Google which surpasses JSON performance (i.e. it is smaller, faster, and simpler). It is a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.

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Protobuf API Contract Guideline

This post provides guidelines to manage APIs using protocol buffers. Check out this blog post to learn more about Protobuf API contract management.

API Contracts

API contracts describe the surface area of the request and response of each individual API method being offered. It is something that both API providers and API consumers can agree upon and get to work developing and delivering, and then integrating and consuming. An API contract is a shared understanding of what the capabilities of a digital interface are, allowing for applications to be programmed on top of.

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Supersonic, Subatomic gRPC Services With Java and Quarkus

gRPC is an open source remote procedure call (RPC) framework. It was released by Google in 2015 and is now an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This post introduces gRPC while explaining its underlying architecture and how it compares to REST over HTTP. You'll also get started using Quarkus to implement and consume gRPC services.

Remote Method Calling in gRPC

Wait, what’s this? Did you say remote method calling? Isn’t that something we did in the ‘90s with things like CORBA, RMI, and XML-RPC/SOAP?

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The Modern Way of Managing APIs Using Protobuf and OpenAPI

I am a tech-enthusiast, and I love sharing new technologies, ideas, and innovations about software development. This time, I will be talking about API contract management with Protobuf and OpenAPI.

One of the most important aspects of microservices-based applications is the ability to deploy microservices completely independent of one another. To achieve this independence, each microservice must provide a versioned, well-defined contract to its clients. Each service must not break contracts until it's known that no other microservice relies on a particular contract version.

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How to Use Protobuf With Apache Kafka and Schema Registry

Since Confluent Platform version 5.5, Avro is no longer the only schema in town. Protobuf and JSON schemas are now supported as first-class citizens in Confluent universe. But before I go on explaining how to use Protobuf with Kafka, let’s answer one often-asked question:

Why Do We Need Schemas?

When applications communicate through a pub-sub system, they exchange messages and those messages need to be understood and agreed upon by all the participants in the communication. Additionally, you would like to detect and prevent changes to the message format that would make messages unreadable for some of the participants. 

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Compile Protocol Buffers Using Maven

Hi folks! In this article, we will explore how to compile protocol buffers using Maven. We assume the reader has a basic idea about protocol buffers and Maven.

Google developed protocol buffers for use in their internal services. It is a binary encoding format that allows you to specify a schema for your data using a specification language, like so:

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The Flavors of APIs

Flavors of APIs

In today’s tech landscape, APIs are a hot topic. The rise of microservice-based architectures as opposed to legacy monoliths has further driven the necessity of robust APIs. With microservices, powerful applications are broken up – i.e. distributed as discrete components across numerous logical and physical machines. This is possible in part due to the availability of cloud computing – virtualized access to almost limitless compute and storage resources made available in a pay-as-you-go model, provided by large technology companies operating massive data centers around the globe.

You may also like:  Identifying the Different Types of APIs

These microservices-based architectures are a contrast to the large-scale, tightly coupled applications of the past that were better designed to run on the limited infrastructure available at the time. When applications required more resources, they would need to scale vertically (i.e. adding more memory, CPU, or storage to the machine). The ubiquity of computing resources in the cloud allows modern applications to instead scale horizontally, by distributing the load over many less powerful machines. Further, applications can be designed intelligently – with components running on infrastructure that better meets the unique load. This ultimately leads to bite-sized chunks of the larger application having infrastructure which is uncoupled from the rest.

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Reactive Service to Service Communication With RSocket (Part 3): Abstraction Over RSocket

Communication with RSocket.


If you are familiar with the previous articles of this series, you have probably noticed that RSocket provides a low-level API. We can operate directly on the methods from the interaction model and without any constraints sends the frames back and forth. It gives us a lot of freedom and control, but it may introduce extra issues, especially related to the contract between microservices.