Building better microservices with GRPC

Today, massive systems are running on microservices communicating with each other using REST APIs. HTTP is easy to get started, loosely structured and does good job in exchanging messages. But it's convenience comes with a performance trade-off, which takes us back to other optimal alternative: gRPC

Transcript

1. Building better microservices with GRPC Pycon India 2018
2. Narendran @DudeWhoCode 
 www.dudewho.codes Software Consultant, Tarka Labs
3. Netflix microservices traffic diagram [https://www.honeycomb.io/microservices/]
4. REST APIs
5. What’s wrong with REST ?
6. REST is good… ✤ Text based protocol ✤ Human readable API contracts ✤ Great tooling for testing and inspection ✤ Postman, FTW. ✤ Well defined HTTP status codes
7. …but
8. …but ✤ Systems needs machine readable API contract ✤ Streaming is not easy ✤ Duplex communication is impossible ✤ Inconsistent patterns ✤ HTTP/1.1
9. Inconsistent patterns and payload ?
10. HTTP methods ✤ GET ✤ POST ✤ PUT ✤ DELETE ✤ PATCH ✤ HEAD ✤ OPTIONS
11. Q: Why isn’t the demo working ?
12. Q: Why isn’t the demo working ? A: The API broke
13. HTTP/1.1
14. 1990 1995 2005 2005 2010 2015 2018 HTTP/0.9 HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 HTTP/2
15. HTTP/1.1 is slow. Why ?
16. Connection overload 
 New TCP connection for every HTTP request HTTP/1.1 is slow. Why ?
17. Connection overload 
 New TCP connection for every HTTP request Header overload 
 Uncompressed, repeating plain text headers for every http request HTTP/1.1 is slow. Why ?
18. HTTP/1.1 is slow. Why ? Connection overload 
 New TCP connection for every HTTP request Header overload 
 Uncompressed, repeating plain text headers for every http request HOL blocking 
 A line of packets is held up by the first packet
19. REST on HTTP/1.1
20. What is gRPC ?
21. gRPC is a protocol where a client application can directly call methods on a server application on a different machine as if it was a local object, making it easier for you to create distributed applications and services. www.grpc.io
22. Companies that uses GRPC in production
23. Such Innovashun Much Scale So New Wow So Distributed Developer Doge
24. gRPC The idea of treating network operations as remote procedure calls goes back at least to the 1970s in early ARPANET documents.
25. gRPC The idea of treating network operations as remote procedure calls goes back at least to the 1970s in early ARPANET documents. First practical implementation was called Lupine at Xerox PARC. One of the first business uses of RPC was by Xerox under the name "Courier" in 1981
26. gRPC The idea of treating network operations as remote procedure calls goes back at least to the 1970s in early ARPANET documents. First practical implementation was called Lupine at Xerox PARC. One of the first business uses of RPC was by Xerox under the name "Courier" in 1981 The first popular implementation of RPC on Unix was Sun's RPC (now called ONC RPC), used as the basis for Network File System (NFS).
27. How RPC works ?
28. www.grpc.io
29. Why gRPC(is faster) ?
30. gRPC uses HTTP/2 ✤ Minimizes header overhead ✤ Minimizes HOL blocking ✤ Minimizes number of connections ✤ Thereby, minimizing API latency
31. Headers in HTTP/1.1 [plain text] :method GET :scheme Https :host tarkalabs.com :path /team user-agent Chrome auth_token 3286354f34s3546 :method GET :scheme Https :host tarkalabs.com :path /projects user-agent Chrome auth_token 3286354f34s3546 Request #1 Request #2
32. Headers in HTTP/2 [HPAC] :method GET :scheme Https :host tarkalabs.com :path /team user-agent Chrome auth_token 3286354f34s3546 Index of repeating fields + :path /projects Request #1 Request #2
33. Optimized connections https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r7QXGYOLCh4fcUq0jDdDwKJWNqWK1o4xMtYpKZCJYjM/present?slide=id.p19 ✤ All the data is sent as frames over single TCP connection ✤ Duplex communication happened between server and client in a connection
34. gRPC uses ProtocolBuffers ✤ gRPC uses protocol buffers for seriailzation ✤ Protocol buffers: A structured and faster way for data serialization
35. Protobufs are Schema Oriented message Person { required string name = 1; required int32 id = 2; optional string email = 3; }
36. Protobufs are backward compatible if (version == 3) { ... } else if (version > 4) { if (version == 5) { ... } ... } // No ugly versioning
37. Protobufs are faster https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobuf/
38. Even more faster between microservices https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobuf/
39. gRPC basics ✤ Define your function ✤ Service Definition using protobuf ✤ Generate server stub, extend it and start the server ✤ Generate client stub
40. Connections ✤ Unary ✤ Response stream ✤ Request stream ✤ Bi-directional stream Server Client
41. Supported Languages ✤ Python ✤ C++ ✤ C# ✤ Dart ✤ Go ✤ Node.js ✤ Objective-C ✤ PHP ✤ Java ✤ Ruby
42. Demo
43. Drawbacks ✤ No browser support ✤ Not enough documentation ✤ No standardisation across languages ✤ Smaller community ✤ No out of the box Load balancers from cloud providers
44. gRPC or REST …?
45. …depends ✤ Choose gRPC if for server to server communication and services that follows same development cycle (mircoservices) ✤ Choose REST for public facing services or the service with interacts with your browser
46. There is no such thing as best solution. There can only be systems that are more appropriate in a particular set of circumstances. – Ancient Chinese Saying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_old_man
47. There is no such thing as best solution. There can only be systems that are more appropriate in a particular set of circumstances. – The Pragmatic Programmer
48. gRPC Resources ✤ gRPC python Greeter Quickstart [https://grpc.io/docs/ quickstart/python.html] ✤ gRPC python docs [https://grpc.io/docs/tutorials/basic/ python.html] ✤ Protocol Buffers Introduction [https://developers.google.com/ protocol-buffers/docs/overview] ✤ Protocol Buffers python reference [https:// developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/ python-generated]
49. Naren
 @DudeWhoCode www.dudewho.codes/talks