gRPC: Integrating east / west services in high performance!

During my journey in microservices, it became apparent that the REST standard has been widely used in communication between microservices for a long time. But recently gRPC started to invade its territory. It turns out that there are some good reasons for this.

In this lecture I will present an introduction to gRPC, its main characteristics and the reasons why companies like Google, Netflix and Docker will adopt this flexible and performative means of communication.

Transcript

1. Integrating east / west services in high performance! Luram Archanjo
2. Who am I? • Software Engineer at Sensedia • MBA in Java projects • Java and Microservice enthusiastic
3. Agenda • Microservices • Communication Pattern • gRPC • Questions
4. Moving to Microservices Feature A Feature B Feature C Monolith Microservice Microservice Microservices Microservice
5. • Communication • Security / Authentication • Network Communication Speed • Language Interoperability Challenges with Microservices
6. Communication Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice
7. Communication Microservice Microservice Microservice HTTP + JSON REpresentational State Transfer Microservice Microservice BD
8. Microservice Communication Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice Microservice
9. Communication Patterns
10. Communication Patterns Microservice Microservice API GATEWAY Microservice Microservice API GATEWAY North / South East / West
11. Communication Patterns Microservice Microservice API GATEWAY East / West Synchronous Microservice Microservice API GATEWAY East / West Asynchronous REST
12. Communication Patterns Microservice Microservice API GATEWAY East / West Synchronous REST • Web already built on top of HTTP • Easy to understand • Variety of http implementation in any languages • Loose coupling between client and server
13. Communication Patterns Microservice Microservice API GATEWAY East / West Synchronous REST • Operations are difficult to model • Streaming is difficult to implement • Bi-directional streaming is not possible • Inefficient, textual representation are not optimal for networks
14. Ok….REST is OK for IPC, but I want to improve!
16. What is RPC and gRPC?
17. • A high-performance open-source universal RPC framework • Based on “Stubby” (Google’s internal RPC system) • Part of Cloud Native Computing Foundation
18. So what makes gRPC so effective?
19. • Strongly typed • Rules for making backwards compatible changes • Efficient binary data representation for network transmission • Comprehensive style guide Protocol Buffers Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.
20. Interface Definition Language The API definition and structure of the payload messages. syntax = “proto3”; message PersonRequest { string name = 1; int32 age = 2; } message PersonResponse { int32 id = 1; string name = 2; int32 age = 3; } service PersonService { rpc create(PersonRequest) returns (PersonResponse); }
21. Define once, generates well-structured code for all supported language!
22. Ruby microservice gRPC server Go microservice gRPC server gRPC Stub Java microservice gRPC Stub Python microservice gRPC server gRPC Stub Multiple Language Support
23. Multiple Platform Support
24. Works over HTTP 2
25. History of HTTP HTTP 0.9 1991 HTTP 1 1996 HTTP 2 2015 HTTP 1.1 16 years without evolution 1999
26. HTTP 2 • Multiplexing • Bidirectional Streaming • HTTPS • Performance HTTP 2 HTTP 1.x
27. HTTP 2 • Multiplexing • Bidirectional Streaming • HTTPS • Performance
28. HTTP 2 • Multiplexing • Bidirectional Streaming • HTTPS ◦ SSL/TLS ◦ Token authentication ◦ Channel credentials ◦ Call credentials • Performance
29. HTTP 2 • Multiplexing • Bidirectional Streaming • HTTPS • Performance HTTP 1.1 HTTP 2
30. Connection options The client sends a single request and gets back a single response Unary RPC The server sends back a stream of responses after getting the client’s request message Server streaming RPC The client sends a stream of requests to the server instead of a single request Client streaming RPC The call is initiated by the client calling the method and the server receiving the client metadata, method name, and deadline Bidirectional streaming RPC
31. Connection options Unary RPC rpc SayHello(HelloRequest) returns (HelloResponse); Server streaming RPC rpc LotsOfReplies(HelloRequest) returns (stream HelloResponse); Client streaming RPC rpc LotsOfGreetings(stream HelloRequest) returns (HelloResponse); Bidirectional streaming RPC rpc BidiHello(stream HelloRequest) returns (stream HelloResponse);
32. Who is using gRPC?
33. Companies
34. Community
35. Why mainly Google and Netflix are using gRPC?
36. Performance Sources: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/announcing-grpc-alpha-for-google-cloud-pubsub
37. Performance Sources: https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2015/etcd-distributed-key-value-store-with-grpc-http2, https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobuf
38. Flexibility & Summary Source: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/grpc
39. Where to use gRPC?
40. Use case gRPC shines as a way to connect servers in service-oriented environments Microservices gRPC works just as well in client-server applications, where the client application runs on desktop or mobile devices Client-Server Application gRPC is also a way to offer APIs over the Internet, for integrating applications with services from third-party providers Integrations and APIs Connecting mobile devices, browser clients to backend services Browser-based Web Applications
41. Thanks a million! /larchanjo /luram-archanjo