Adopting gRPC
gRPC was published in 2015 as an open source RPC framework. It is one of the most promising protocols to be used in automation because it is easy to create a program and add methods to obtain or set configuration on the network device.
gRPC does not directly use TCP for transport, but HTTP/2 instead, which was published in 2015 to overcome the limitations of HTTP/1.1. While it is backward compatible with HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 brings many added advanced capabilities, such as the following:
- Binary framing layer: Request and response is divided into small messages and framed in binary format, making message transmission efficient
- Bidirectional full-duplex streaming: Here, the client can request and the server can respond simultaneously
- Flow control (used in HTTP/2): Enables the detailed control of memory used for the network buffers
- Header compression: Everything in HTTP/2, including headers, is encoded before it is sent, significantly improving performance...
