What is gRPC?
These days microservices are becoming more and more popular. The developers often use them during the development of large-scale applications. But a challenge comes with using the microservices, i.e., they are usually written in different languages, and the exchange of information can become difficult.
This is where gRPC comes into the picture, but before we discuss it, we need to understand what gRPC is.
RPC
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is the oldest client-server communication method in use today. Instead of the traditional HTTP call, RPC uses a function call. It means that on the client-side, you invoke a function that is written on the server-side code. It only looks like you are calling it like a regular function but instead, it is happening through the network.
gRPC
gRPC is an open-source framework developed by Google in 2015 for implementing RPC APIs using the HTTP/2 protocol. The ‘g’ in gRPC does not stand for Google. In fact, Google changes its meaning in every release.
With gRPC, the abstraction has become easy since it is a function call. It also supports a lot of programming languages. So you can use gRPC in microservices to communicate with other services that are written in some different programming language
You can see in the picture that a C++ service is using gRPC to communicate with a Ruby and Android-Java client using protocol request and response.
Benefits of Using gRPC
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using gRPC:
The messages in gRPC are lightweight. Depending on the type of call, gRPC-specific messages can be up to 30% smaller in size than JSON messages. gRPC provides high performance. It can be 8 times faster than REST and JSON communication. gRPC automatically generates code for different programming languages for the purpose of working with them.