About remote procedure call gRPC

If you have been exposed to distributed systems, you must have come across RPC, which is the abbreviation of Remote Procedure Call. In layman's terms, it allows a program on one computer to execute a program on another machine, and the RPC protocol is the one that can achieve this remote requirement. gRPC is an RPC protocol implemented by Google, and many companies choose it as the implementation of RPC because it is faster, more efficient and more secure.

Background

Before 2000, people had already implemented RPC calls, and at that time people used REST to implement it, but this efficiency was very low. Therefore, in 2016, Google launched the free and open source gRPC protocol.

Because of its very strong performance, its lightweight message transmission performance is much better than that of JSON.

In addition, it also provides a very convenient code generation tool, you can easily generate RPC codes corresponding to various languages ​​​​.

Advantages of gRPC

As we said before, performance is the most important factor. No matter how easy to use and convenient you are, if your efficiency is not high enough, you will not be recognized by most people. And this is also the main reason why C language has always occupied the programming market share. The performance is strong enough.

Because gRRC provides automatic generation tools, we can build code very quickly by defining common proto files. It can also generate code corresponding to various languages ​​very conveniently, which is very suitable for multi-language team projects.

gRPC supports bidirectional streaming, which plays a huge role in game applications. In addition, bidirectional streaming also makes message transmission very convenient.

gRPC is secure, it supports the TLS protocol, it supports token-based authentication, and calls can be made through channels to ensure data security.

How to use

Google provides very rich and detailed documentation. You can find the programming language you are good at and then start learning through simple cases.

What you need to master is how to define functions and message body structures in the proto file, and then by running grpc_tools, you can generate RPC code in the corresponding language.

The process is generally as follows.

• Defining services
• Define the rpc method, specify the request type, return type
• Generate server-side code, generate client-side code
• Create a server, create a client

Summarize

gRPC has excellent efficiency, supports bidirectional flow, and has very high security, so many companies have begun to adopt gRPC as a remote calling framework.

For the Internet of Things, the excellent performance of gRPC will play a greater role. In the era of the Internet of Everything, are you sure you don’t want to learn gRPC?