There are many technologies for service-to-service communication. SOAP web services were considered the standard for a long time. Today, REST or at least REST-like web services have established themselves in the vast majority of application scenarios. The gRPC protocol developed by Google is a more recent alternative to service-to-service communication and has been available in ASP.NET Core since version 3.0. The protocol is based on HTTP (at least version 2), relies on a contract-first development model, enables bidirectional communication between two services, reduces the load on the network using binary serialization, is available in many common programming languages and offers many other advantages.

In this presentation, we will start with an introduction to gRPC with ASP.NET Core and continue on looking at the differences to REST web services and SOAP web services based on WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). We will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of gRPC, which should be known before using it in practice.