Microservice Management

The absolute most common communication between microservices are via REST API. It’s done over https and requires no or very little configuration on the network.

We recommend to use the standard methods for your api requests; GET for fetching data, POST for saving new data, PUT for updating and DELETE for deletion. PATCH can also be used for updating, it’s a matter of taste.

One common way of describing the microservice’s methods is to use an OpenAPI/Swagger that will create an HTML-page with all methods and data models described. Swagger documentation will be created automatically if you use e.g. Swashbuckle in your .net project. 

gRPC is another a common protocol to use for communication between microservices. It’s faster than http.

gRPC and HTTP REST are both ways to transfer data over a network, but they have some differences.

gRPC is a modern, open source, high-performance RPC framework that can run in any environment. It uses HTTP/2 for transport, Protocol Buffers as the interface description language, and provides features such as bidirectional streaming and flow control, cancelling long-running operations, and authentication.

On the other hand, HTTP REST is a architectural style for building distributed systems that can be used with any application protocol running over any transport. It is based on the idea of representing a system’s resources as a set of interconnected nodes, and using HTTP verbs (such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to manipulate these resources. REST is widely used because it is simple and flexible.

In general, gRPC is better suited for situations where performance and efficiency are important, while REST is more widely adopted and easier to use in a variety of situations.