Working with Protocol Buffers and gRPC

In this chapter, we are going to enter the world of protocol buffers. The REST API needs support from other internal services. Those internal services can implement a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and use a protocol buffer as a data exchange format. First, we will discover the benefits of using protocol buffers instead of JSON for services, and where to use both. We will use Google's proto library to compile protocol buffers. We will also try to write a few web services with protocol buffers that can talk to either Go, or other applications such as Python and Node.js. Then, we'll explain gRPC, an advanced simplified form of RPC. We will learn how gRPC and protocol buffers can help us build low-bandwidth services that can be consumed by different clients. Finally, we will discuss HTTP/2 and its benefits over plain HTTP/1.1-based services...