When should I use gRPC instead of REST?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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