Summary of What We Learned

In this course, we have learned all the main features of the gRPC implementation on ASP.NET Core. We started with the basic project setup for the gRPC server and gRPC client. Then, we gradually moved to more advanced topics.

We learned the fundamentals of Protobuf, which is the serialization format for the messages used in gRPC communication. We became familiar with its structure, its keywords, and some of its advanced usages, such as customizable options. We also learned how to extend Protobuf contracts with built-in libraries that allow us to use well-known data types in the gRPC messages that aren't available otherwise.

We covered all four types of gRPC calls: unary, server-streaming, client-streaming, and bi-directional streaming. We also learned the use cases for each of the call types.

We looked at how to configure gRPC communication channels, both on the server and client sides. In addition to this, we covered the process of versioning gRPC APIs so that newer versions of the server would still be compatible with older versions of the client.

We've learned how to scale out gRPC communication so that it can support large numbers of simultaneous client connections. We looked at multiple ways of achieving this with different types of load balancers and address resolvers.

To make our gRPC applications production ready, we looked at different ways of securing and monitoring them. We went over the process of encrypting the messages with TLS. We looked at how to apply authentication and authorization on gRPC calls. We learned how to monitor what applications are doing by using logging and metrics.

Finally, we covered some nonstandard gRPC use cases as well. We learned how to use an external library to write gRPC messaging contracts without having to write Protobuf definitions by hand. We also learned how to call gRPC services from inside a web browser.

This course has taught us everything we need to know to start writing our own production-grade gRPC applications.