gRPC

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Capabilities
• Installation
• gRPC clients
• Client creation
• Client usage
• gRPC services
• Service creation
• Service method handling
• Middlewares
• Metrics

Introduction

🐙 userver provides a gRPC driver as userver-grpc library. It uses namespace ugrpc::client and namespace ugrpc::server.

The driver wraps grpcpp in the userver asynchronous interface.

See also:

• gRPC client and service
• Official gRPC documentation
• grpcpp reference
• grpc-core reference

Capabilities

• Creating asynchronous gRPC clients and services;
• Forwarding gRPC Core logs to userver logs;
• Caching and reusing connections;
• Timeouts;
• Collection of metrics on driver usage;
• Cancellation support;
• Automatic authentication using middlewares;
• Deadline propagation .

Installation

Generate and link a library from .proto schemas and link to it in your CMakeLists.txt:

include(GrpcTargets)
add_grpc_library(${PROJECT_NAME}-proto PROTOS samples/greeter.proto)
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} ${PROJECT_NAME}-proto)

add_grpc_library will link userver-grpc transitively and will generate the usual .pb.h + .pb.cc files. For service definitions, it will additionally generate asynchronous interfaces foo_client.usrv.pb.hpp and foo_service.usrv.pb.hpp.

To create gRPC clients in your microservice, register the provided ugrpc::client::ClientFactoryComponent and add the corresponding component section to the static config.

To create gRPC services in your microservice, register the provided ugrpc::server::ServerComponent and add the corresponding component section to the static config.

gRPC clients

Client creation

In a component constructor, find ugrpc::client::ClientFactoryComponent and store a reference to its ugrpc::client::ClientFactory. Using it, you can create gRPC clients of code-generated YourServiceClient types.

Client creation in an expensive operation! Either create them once at the server boot time or cache them.

Client usage

Typical steps include:

• Filling a std::unique_ptr<grpc::ClientContext> with request settings
  • gRPC documentation recommends using set_deadline for each RPC
  • Fill the authentication metadata as necessary
• Stream creation by calling a client method
• Operations on the stream
• Depending on the RPC kind, it is necessary to call Finish or Read until it returns false (otherwise the connection will close abruptly)

Read the documentation on gRPC streams:

• Single request, single response ugrpc::client::UnaryCall
• Single request, response stream ugrpc::client::InputStream
• Request stream, single response ugrpc::client::OutputStream
• Request stream, response stream ugrpc::client::BidirectionalStream

On errors, exceptions from userver/ugrpc/client/exceptions.hpp are thrown. It is recommended to catch them outside the entire stream interaction. You can catch exceptions for specific gRPC error codes or all at once.

gRPC services

Service creation

A service implementation is a class derived from a code-generated YourServiceBase interface class. Each service method from the schema corresponds to a method of the interface class. If you don't override some of the methods, UNIMPLEMENTED error code will be reported for those.

To register your service:

• Create a component that derives from ugrpc::server::ServiceComponentBase
• Store your service implementation instance inside the component
• Call ugrpc::server::ServiceComponentBase::RegisterService in the component's constructor
• Don't forget to register your service component.

Service method handling

Each method receives:

• A stream controller object, used to respond to the RPC
  • Also contains grpc::ClientContext from grpcpp library
• A request (for single-request RPCs only)

When using a server stream, always call Finish or FinishWithError. Otherwise the client will receive UNKNOWN error, which signifies an internal server error.

Read the documentation on gRPC streams:

• Single request, single response ugrpc::server::UnaryCall
• Request stream, single response ugrpc::server::InputStream
• Single request, response stream ugrpc::server::OutputStream
• Request stream, response stream ugrpc::server::BidirectionalStream

On connection errors, exceptions from userver/ugrpc/server/exceptions.hpp are thrown. It is recommended not to catch them, leading to RPC interruption. You can catch exceptions for specific gRPC error codes or all at once.

Middlewares

The gRPC server can be extended by middlewares. Middleware is called on each incoming RPC request. Different middlewares handle the call subsequently. A middleware may decide to reject the call or call the next middleware in the stack. Middlewares may implement almost any enhancement to the gRPC server including authorization and authentication, ratelimiting, logging, tracing, audit, etc.

Middlewares to use are indicated in static config in section middlewares of ugrpc::server::ServiceComponentBase descendant component.

Metrics

• Client metrics are put inside grpc.client.by-destination {grpc_destination=FULL_SERVICE_NAME/METHOD_NAME}
• Server metrics are put inside grpc.server.by-destination {grpc_destination=FULL_SERVICE_NAME/METHOD_NAME}

These are the metrics provided for each gRPC method:

Metric name	Description
timings.1min	time from RPC start to finish (utils::statistics::Percentile)
status.STATUS_CODE_NAME	RPCs that finished with specified status codes
network-error	RPCs that did not finish with a status due to a network error
abandoned-error	RPCs that we forgot to Finish (always a bug in ugrpc usage)
rps	Requests per second: sum(status) + network-error
eps	Errors per second: rps - status.OK
active	The number of currently active RPCs (created and not finished)

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