gRPC Explained: High-Performance APIs, Streaming, and Deployment using an API Gateway

gRPC is an open-source, high-performance RPC framework developed by Google that allows communication between applications or services. It's particularly popular for microservices and distributed systems due to its efficiency, scalability, and support for multiple languages. gRPC offers several benefits over HTTP/JSON, including performance, streaming capabilities, and code generation of endpoints. However, it is relatively newer than HTTP/REST, so the maturity of tools and libraries around gRPC isn't as advanced. API Gateways implement cross-cutting functionality such as authentication, logging, rate limiting, and load balancing. By using an API Gateway with your gRPC APIs, you can deploy this functionality outside of your core gRPC service(s). Edge Stack API Gateway supports gRPC due to its use of Envoy Proxy as its core proxying engine. Deploying a gRPC service with Edge Stack API Gateway is straightforward and involves creating an Ambassador mapping for the gRPC service. Deploying a simple Hello, World gRPC service can illustrate this functionality. To test that Edge Stack and the service are working properly, you'll need to run a gRPC client. In summary, Edge Stack makes it easy to publish gRPC services to your consumers by leveraging Envoy's robust gRPC support. By publishing your services through Ambassador, you can add authentication, rate limiting, and other functionality to your gRPC services.