When should I use events over REST or gRPC?
When the action is async (e.g., user signed up, send a welcome email), multiple consumers care about one event, or you need to handle bursts without losing data. Events decouple services and scale better.
Explore This Question
Search for additional explanations using these tools:
More FAQs in Communication Between Microservices: REST vs gRPC vs Events
Three common ways: REST (HTTP/JSON), gRPC (HTTP/2 with Protocol Buffers), and events (pub/sub with Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS). Each suits different needs.
For internal service-to-service calls with high traffic, streaming needs, or when you want typed schemas and fast serialization. gRPC is faster and smaller than REST; it is harder to debug and not browser-friendly without a gateway.
Sync (REST, gRPC): the caller waits for a response. Async (events): the publisher fires and moves on. Sync is simpler to reason about; async scales better and decouples services.
Still have questions?
Browse all our FAQs or reach out to our support team