Chapter 10. Communication between cloud services
This chapter covers
- Introducing microservice communication
- Reusing connections between services for faster performance
- Providing faster JSON marshaling and unmarshaling
- Using protocol buffers for faster payload transfer
- Communicating over RPC
Representational State Transfer (REST) is the most common form of communication between services, and the most common data format used to transfer information is JSON. REST is an incredibly powerful way to expose interacting with applications to developers and the applications they build.
When communicating between cloud services or microservices within a broader application, you have options besides REST. Some of these options provide for faster communication that uses less bandwidth. In a microservice architecture, in which network communications come into play and can make a real performance difference, some areas can be optimized.
In this chapter, you’ll first learn about a microservice architecture and how the network can become a bottleneck or cause performance slowdowns when these services communicate. From there, you’ll learn techniques that can speed up REST communications—in particular, JSON communications. Then you’ll explore communication techniques other than REST and JSON that can provide an alternative approach.