Introduction to RPC

In regular programming, it is often useful to encapsulate frequently used logic in a function so that it can be reused in multiple places. With the rise of networked and distributed systems, it became necessary to let a common set of operations be accessible over a network, so that validated clients can call them. This is often called a Remote Procedure Call (RPC). In Chapter 4, Data Serialization, De-Serialization, and Parsing, we saw a simple example of this when a server returned the distance of a given point from the origin. Real world RPC has a number of application layer protocols defined, which are far more complex. One of the most popular RPC implementations is gRPC, which was initially introduced by Google and later moved to an open source model. gRPC offers high performance RPC over internet scale networks and is widely used in a number of projects...