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gRPC Transport

HTTP/2 multiplexing, binary encoding and streaming semantics.

4Questions
12Flashcards
3Terms
Drill this topic All of Networking
Questions

4 to work through

  1. intermediate

    A file-sync company moves internal service communication from JSON over HTTP to gRPC. What improves, what gets harder, and where would you keep HTTP/JSON?

    2 min answer
  2. intermediate

    A telemetry platform must choose between HTTP/JSON and gRPC for high-volume ingestion from thousands of agents. What actually decides it?

    1 min answer
  3. intermediate

    An organisation standardises internal service communication. What actually distinguishes gRPC from JSON over HTTP at scale, and where does each break down?

    2 min answer
  4. advanced Multiple choice

    A gRPC service sits behind a layer 4 load balancer. One backend receives most of the traffic and adding instances does not help. Why?

    2 min answer
Terminology

3 terms in this topic

protocol

gRPC as a Transport

A binary contract-first RPC protocol over HTTP/2 — efficient and strongly typed for internal service-to-service calls, awkward at the browser edge.

 concept

gRPC Streaming

Four call patterns — unary, server streaming, client streaming and bidirectional — built on HTTP/2 streams.

 protocol

Protocol Buffers

A binary serialisation format with a schema definition language, generating typed code and enforcing explicit compatibility rules through field numbering.
Networking

Neighbouring topics

Networking

General material on the network path underneath an architecture.

4 quiz 13 cards 14 terms

TCP/IP

Handshakes, congestion control, head-of-line blocking and connection reuse.

3 quiz 9 cards 2 terms

HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3

Multiplexing, prioritisation and the transport each is built on.

4 quiz 11 cards 5 terms

DNS

Resolution, TTL behaviour, traffic steering and failover latency.

5 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

TLS & Certificates

Encryption, integrity, authentication, termination points and expiry.

6 quiz 7 cards 5 terms

Layer 4 vs Layer 7

Connection-level versus request-level balancing, and what each unlocks.

4 quiz 10 cards 3 terms

Reverse Proxies

One place for TLS, routing, caching, compression and rate limiting.

3 quiz 9 cards 5 terms

Content Delivery Networks

Edge caching, origin offload, spike absorption and dynamic content.

8 quiz 11 cards 6 terms

Firewalls & Security Groups

Default-deny, stateful rules, and restricting egress as well as ingress.

5 quiz 8 cards 3 terms

NAT & Egress

Outbound-only connectivity, its per-gigabyte cost and its zone binding.

4 quiz 11 cards 4 terms

VPC Design

Address planning, peering and the ranges you can never resize.

3 quiz 9 cards 3 terms

Subnetting

Tiering, zone binding, and sizing for an address-hungry platform.

3 quiz 9 cards 3 terms

Routing & BGP

How traffic finds you, anycast, and route withdrawal as a failure mode.

2 quiz 8 cards 5 terms

Service Mesh Networking

Sidecar proxies supplying mTLS, retries and traffic policy.

4 quiz 11 cards 3 terms

WebSockets & Realtime

Persistent bidirectional connections and the capacity model they impose.

6 quiz 13 cards 6 terms

API Gateways

The single entry point, and the business logic that must stay out of it.

3 quiz 10 cards 4 terms

Network Performance

Latency floors, bandwidth-delay product, and what no code change fixes.

5 quiz 13 cards 5 terms

Private Connectivity

Private endpoints, peering and dedicated links to managed services.

4 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

Network Troubleshooting

Flow logs, packet paths, and localising a problem to a hop.

6 quiz 8 cards 3 terms