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What is GRPC?
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- Skip2 Networks
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- Content Manager
Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC)
gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) is a high-performance, open-source framework developed by Google for handling remote procedure calls (RPCs). Unlike traditional REST APIs that often rely on JSON over HTTP/1.1, gRPC uses Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) as its Interface Definition Language (IDL) and HTTP/2 as its underlying transport protocol. This combination allows gRPC to offer several advantages, including efficient serialization of data, support for various types of service interactions (unary, server streaming, client streaming, and bidirectional streaming), and built-in features like authentication, load balancing, and health checking.
By leveraging HTTP/2's multiplexing capabilities and Protobuf's compact binary format, gRPC can significantly reduce latency and network bandwidth consumption, making it particularly well-suited for microservices architectures, mobile communications, and applications requiring real-time data streaming. Its language-agnostic nature, with tooling that automatically generates client and server code in multiple programming languages, further simplifies cross-platform development and fosters robust, efficient communication between different services within a distributed system.