gRPC and Protocol Buffers

REST is a popular choice for communication between microservices because it is simple, flexible, and widely supported. However, as microservices architectures grow, services may need to communicate thousands or even millions of times per second. In these situations, the overhead of JSON serialization, network requests, and repeated data transfers can become significant.

This is where gRPC and Protocol Buffers become useful. gRPC is a high-performance framework for communication between services, while Protocol Buffers provide a compact and efficient way to serialize structured data.

Together, they offer strongly defined API contracts, efficient communication, and support for real-time streaming. Let's understand how they work and when they make sense in a microservices architecture.