What is gRPC in your own words and have you worked with it?

gRPC is a modern framework for remote procedure calls (RPC), developed by Google. It uses HTTP/2 for efficient data transfer and Protocol Buffers (protobuf) for message serialization, which ensures high performance and data compactness.

The main idea of gRPC is to define services and methods in protobuf files, after which code for the client and server is automatically generated in various programming languages. This simplifies the creation of distributed systems and microservices with a clearly typed API.

I have worked with gRPC in Go projects, where I used it for communication between microservices. This allowed for low latency and easy API versioning support.

Example of defining a service in protobuf:

syntax = "proto3";

service UserService {
  rpc GetUser (UserRequest) returns (UserResponse);
}

message UserRequest {
  int32 id = 1;
}

message UserResponse {
  string name = 1;
  int32 age = 2;
}

Then, server and client code are generated in Go, which simplifies development.