gRPC: Up and Running

Chapter 5. gRPC: Beyond the Basics

When you build real-world gRPC applications you may have to augment them with various capabilities to meet requirements such as intercepting incoming and outgoing RPC, handling network delays resiliently, handling errors, sharing metadata between services and consumers, and so on.

Note

To maintain consistency, all samples in this chapter are explained using Go. If you’re more familiar with Java, you can refer to the Java samples in the source code repository for the same use cases.

In this chapter, you will learn some key advanced gRPC capabilities including using gRPC interceptors to intercept RPCs on the server and client sides, using deadlines to specify the wait time for an RPC to complete, error-handling best practices on the server and client sides, using multiplexing to run multiple services on the same server, sharing custom metadata between applications, using load-balancing and name resolution techniques when calling other services, and compressing RPC calls to effectively use the network bandwidth.

Let’s begin our discussion with gRPC interceptors.

Interceptors

As you build gRPC applications, you may want to execute some common logic before or after the execution of the remote function, for either client or server applications. In gRPC you can intercept that RPC’s execution to meet certain requirements such as logging, authentication, metrics, etc., using an extension mechanism called an interceptor. gRPC provides simple APIs to ...