Summary

In this chapter, we saw the main considerations that we need to take into account when we design our APIs. Most of them were related to Protobuf since it is the interface of our API, and it handles serialization/deserialization. We saw that choosing the right integer type is important and can lead to problems in terms of payload size but also when we want to evolve our API.

After that, we saw that choosing the right field tag is also important. This is due to the fact that tags are serialized along with the data and that they are serialized as varints. So the bigger the tag, the bigger our payload.

Then, we saw how we can leverage FieldMasks to select the data that we need and avoid the over-fetching problem. While this is a concept that is not that developed in gRPC Go, other implementations use that extensively. This significantly reduces the payload that we send across the wire.

And finally, we saw that we need to be careful when using repeated fields in Protobuf...