Definition
gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) is an open-source framework for service-to-service communication, developed by Google and published in 2016. gRPC uses HTTP/2 as its transport protocol and Protocol Buffers (protobuf) as its serialisation format - binary and significantly more compact than JSONJavaScript Object Notation - lightweight data format for data exchange between systems, standard in REST APIs./RESTRepresentational State Transfer - architectural style for APIs based on HTTP and resource-oriented design.. This delivers very low latency and high throughput, especially for internal microservice architectures where performance is critical. gRPC supports four communication patterns: unary (one request, one response), server-side streaming, client-side streaming and bidirectional streaming. gRPC is particularly popular in polyglot environments because protobuf schemas automatically generate client libraries for many programming languages (Go, KotlinModern statically typed programming language for JVM - Tvimenning's primary language for backend services., JavaObject-oriented programming language - platform-independent and widely used in enterprise systems and backend development., Python and others). In the energy sector, gRPC is relevant for real-time systems that require high-volume bidirectional communication - for example between metering dataData from electricity meters - the foundation for billing, balance settlement and market processes in the power market. collectors and MDMMeter Data Management - system for collection, storage, quality assurance and distribution of metering data from the electricity grid. systems. REST and JSON remain the standard for public APIs.