Comparing REST with gRPC
The most important difference between REST and gRPC is that REST is a guideline that builds upon HTTP, whereas gRPC is a protocol. Both are used for communication between clients and services. Let’s take a closer look.
Communication style
REST is a guideline that defines services to be stateless, makes use of HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to manipulate resources, typically uses a human-readable format such as JSON or XML, and is commonly used with web APIs.
gRPC uses a strongly defined contract to specify the operations that are available with the services. While other specifications can be used as well, most services make use of Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) to specify the contract. With this, gRPC has a compact payload size and efficient serialization.
Performance
When it comes to textual representation, REST has a higher overhead and a higher latency. With gRPC, because of its efficient serialization, latency is lower, and the binary...
