gRPC is a well suited framework for a micro-services architecture, where there are small independent components talking to each other over the network. When I started building multiple components communicating with each other over gRPC, I started realizing there were needs for certain basic tools around a gRPC call (both server side and client side), which were not available out of the box. For example, things like instrumentation of gRPC calls, or a simple health API. I realized I was having to write these components every time I built a new service. This brought me to the idea of building a grpc-commons, which will be a set of basic tools required in a micro-services architecture. In this post, I will be focusing on a couple of things - circuit breaker & monitoring.

In a previous post, I had talked about Building Microservices using gRPC on Ruby. Today, let's talk about how to deploy the same application we built using Docker.

If you are new to the concept of Docker and containers,

Today, REST with JSON is the most popular framework amongst web developers for network communication. But, it is not very suitable for a microservice architecture mainly because of latency added by JSON data transmission / serializing / deserializing.