Communication Protocols between independent programs – a comparisons of gRPC versus REST.
The popularity of web protocols has increased over the last decade because it helps connect heterogeneous applications and services that can be hosted anywhere. There are two popular protocols gRPC and REST. We will use their abbreviations as is with their comparisons as follows:
REST
This is a way of requesting resources from the remote end via standard verbs such as GET, PUT etc.
The advantages are:
• Requires HTTP/1.1
• Supports subscription mechanisms with REST hooks
• Comes with widely accepted tool and browser support
• Well defined road to development of the service that provides this communication
• Supports discovery of resource identifiers with subsequent request response models.
• Is supportive of software development kit where more than one language can be supported for the use of these communication interfaces.
The disadvantages are:
• Is considered chatty because there are a number of requests and responses
• Is considered heavy because the payload is usually large.
• Is considered inflexible at times with versioning costs
gRPC:
This is a way of requesting resources from the remote end because the application by processing routines rather than asking for resources. Routines are the equivalent of verbs and resources and some treat this communication as a refinement of RPC and SOAP which were protocols that are now considered legacy.
The advantages are:
• Supports high speed communication because it is lightweight and does not require the traversal of stack all the way up and down the networking layers.
• The messages are over “Protocol Buffer” which is known for being efficient in packing and unpacking data
• It works over newer HTTP/2
• Best for traffic from devices (IoT)
The disadvantages are
Requires client to write code
Does not support browser
Both REST and gRPC support secure transport layer communication which makes communication between two parties as private. When corporations make significant investment in the development of each, they tend to be a choice for development teams. However, supporting both communication protocol only widens the audience and does not have to be mutually exclusive given enough resources and time. They also broaden the customer base.
Sample implementation: https://github.com/ravibeta/pravega
https://travis-ci.com/ravibeta/pravega
The popularity of web protocols has increased over the last decade because it helps connect heterogeneous applications and services that can be hosted anywhere. There are two popular protocols gRPC and REST. We will use their abbreviations as is with their comparisons as follows:
REST
This is a way of requesting resources from the remote end via standard verbs such as GET, PUT etc.
The advantages are:
• Requires HTTP/1.1
• Supports subscription mechanisms with REST hooks
• Comes with widely accepted tool and browser support
• Well defined road to development of the service that provides this communication
• Supports discovery of resource identifiers with subsequent request response models.
• Is supportive of software development kit where more than one language can be supported for the use of these communication interfaces.
The disadvantages are:
• Is considered chatty because there are a number of requests and responses
• Is considered heavy because the payload is usually large.
• Is considered inflexible at times with versioning costs
gRPC:
This is a way of requesting resources from the remote end because the application by processing routines rather than asking for resources. Routines are the equivalent of verbs and resources and some treat this communication as a refinement of RPC and SOAP which were protocols that are now considered legacy.
The advantages are:
• Supports high speed communication because it is lightweight and does not require the traversal of stack all the way up and down the networking layers.
• The messages are over “Protocol Buffer” which is known for being efficient in packing and unpacking data
• It works over newer HTTP/2
• Best for traffic from devices (IoT)
The disadvantages are
Requires client to write code
Does not support browser
Both REST and gRPC support secure transport layer communication which makes communication between two parties as private. When corporations make significant investment in the development of each, they tend to be a choice for development teams. However, supporting both communication protocol only widens the audience and does not have to be mutually exclusive given enough resources and time. They also broaden the customer base.
Sample implementation: https://github.com/ravibeta/pravega
https://travis-ci.com/ravibeta/pravega
No comments:
Post a Comment