gRPC over HTTP/2 in Rust

If you’re keen on enhancing your networked applications in Rust, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’re exploring Tonic, Rust’s take…

Luis Soares

04 Oct 2023 — 6 min read

If you’re keen on enhancing your networked applications in Rust, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’re exploring Tonic, Rust’s take on the gRPC framework. With its high-performance and reliable infrastructure, Tonic can significantly improve the efficiency of your web services.

Ready to learn more?

Let’s begin with what Tonic and gRPC in Rust offer.

What is Tonic?

Tonic is a gRPC over HTTP/2 implementation focused on high performance, interoperability, and flexibility. Built on top of the hyper, tower, and prost libraries, it offers first-class support for async/await syntax, making it easy to craft high-performance gRPC servers and clients.

Key Features of Tonic:

1. Async/Await Support:

Seamless Integration: Tonic was designed ground-up with Rust’s async/await syntax in mind. This allows developers to write asynchronous code that is both efficient and readable.
Concurrency: Leveraging asynchronous operations means you can handle many requests concurrently without spawning a multitude of threads. This translates to efficient resource usage and better performance.

2. Interceptors:

Middleware-like Functionality: Tonic’s interceptors allow developers to inject custom logic during the request/response lifecycle. This can benefit tasks like logging, authentication, and metrics collection.
Flexibility: Interceptors can be chained and composed, offering a modular way to add layered functionalities to your RPC calls.

3. Code Generation:

Automatic and Efficient: Tonic works seamlessly with the prost library to generate Rust code from .proto files automatically. This auto-generated code adheres to efficient data structures and methods, streamlining the development process.
Evolution-friendly: As your service evolves, updating the .proto files and regenerating Rust code ensures consistency and compatibility.

4. HTTP/2 Support:

Modern Protocol: Tonic fully embraces HTTP/2, the foundation for gRPC. This provides several advantages, like header compression, multiplexing, and stream prioritization.
Performance: With HTTP/2, Tonic can manage multiple simultaneous gRPC calls over a single connection, improving latency and reducing resource usage.

5. Streaming:

Variety of Streaming Options: Tonic supports server-streaming, client-streaming, and bidirectional streaming, allowing developers to handle different use cases like real-time updates or chunked data transfers.
Async Streams: Given its async nature, Tonic makes it intuitive to work with streams, ensuring non-blocking operations throughout.

6. Extensibility:

Integration with Other Libraries: Tonic’s architecture facilitates easy integration with Rust libraries. Whether you’re looking at telemetry with tracing, authentication with JWT, or custom serialization, Tonic provides avenues for extensions.
Custom Middleware: Beyond provided interceptors, developers can craft custom middleware solutions tailored to specific needs, increasing the library’s adaptability to various scenarios.

7. Robust Error Handling:

Detailed Status: Tonic uses the gRPC-defined Status type to represent errors, allowing clear, standardized error messages and codes.
Client and Server Insight: Both clients and servers can derive detailed insights into what went wrong during an RPC call, enabling better debugging and user experience.

8. Efficient Serialization:

Protocol Buffers: Tonic, in conjunction with prost, leverages Protocol Buffers (or Protobuf) – a compact binary serialization format. This ensures efficient serialization and deserialization, reducing overhead and improving communication speed.

Setting Up Tonic

Before diving into examples, ensure you add the required dependencies to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies] 
tonic = "0.5" 
prost = "0.8" 
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }

You’d also want to include the build dependencies to generate Rust code from .proto files:

[build-dependencies] 
tonic-build = "0.5"

Examples:

1. Defining the Protocol

Start by defining your service in a .proto file, for instance, hello_world.proto:

syntax = "proto3"; 
 
package hello_world; 
service Greeter { 
    rpc SayHello (HelloRequest) returns (HelloReply); 
} 
message HelloRequest { 
    string name = 1; 
} 
message HelloReply { 
    string message = 1; 
}

Run the build script to generate Rust code:

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> { 
    tonic_build::compile_protos("proto/hello_world.proto")?; 
    Ok(()) 
}

2. Implementing the Server

Here’s a simple implementation using Tonic:

use tonic::{transport::Server, Request, Response, Status}; 
use hello_world::greeter_server::{Greeter, GreeterServer}; 
use hello_world::{HelloReply, HelloRequest}; 
 
pub mod hello_world { 
    tonic::include_proto!("hello_world"); 
} 
#[derive(Debug, Default)] 
pub struct MyGreeter; 
#[tonic::async_trait] 
impl Greeter for MyGreeter { 
    async fn say_hello( 
        &self, 
        request: Request<HelloRequest>, 
    ) -> Result<Response<HelloReply>, Status> { 
        let reply = hello_world::HelloReply { 
            message: format!("Hello, {}!", request.into_inner().name), 
        }; 
        Ok(Response::new(reply)) 
    } 
} 
#[tokio::main] 
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> { 
    let addr = "[::1]:50051".parse()?; 
    let greeter = MyGreeter::default(); 
    Server::builder() 
        .add_service(GreeterServer::new(greeter)) 
        .serve(addr) 
        .await?; 
    Ok(()) 
}

3. Crafting the Client

Once you have a server, a client is easy to create:

use tonic::transport::Channel; 
use hello_world::greeter_client::GreeterClient; 
use hello_world::HelloRequest; 
 
pub mod hello_world { 
    tonic::include_proto!("hello_world"); 
} 
#[tokio::main] 
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> { 
    let channel = Channel::from_static("http://[::1]:50051") 
        .connect() 
        .await?; 
    let mut client = GreeterClient::new(channel); 
    let request = tonic::Request::new(HelloRequest { 
        name: "Tonic".into(), 
    }); 
    let response = client.say_hello(request).await?; 
    println!("RESPONSE={:?}", response); 
    Ok(()) 
}

Advanced Tonic Features:

Streaming

gRPC allows for server-streaming, client-streaming, and bidirectional-streaming. Tonic leverages async streams in Rust to support these features, making it ergonomic to implement complex data flows.

Server-Streaming Example:

Suppose we wish to send multiple HelloReply messages for a single client request.

service Greeter { 
    rpc StreamHello (HelloRequest) returns (stream HelloReply); 
}

In the server:

#[tonic::async_trait] 
impl Greeter for MyGreeter { 
    type StreamHelloStream = Pin<Box<dyn Stream<Item = Result<HelloReply, Status>> + Send + Sync + 'static>>; 
 
async fn stream_hello( 
        &self, 
        request: Request<HelloRequest>, 
    ) -> Result<Response<Self::StreamHelloStream>, Status> { 
        let name = request.into_inner().name; 
        let messages = vec![ 
            format!("Hello, {}!", name), 
            format!("How are you, {}?", name), 
            format!("Goodbye, {}!", name) 
        ]; 
        let output = futures::stream::iter( 
            messages.into_iter().map(|msg| { 
                Ok(hello_world::HelloReply { message: msg }) 
            }) 
        ); 
        Ok(Response::new(Box::pin(output))) 
    } 
}

On the client side, you can asynchronously iterate over the streamed messages.

let mut response_stream = client.stream_hello(request).await?.into_inner(); 
 
while let Some(response) = response_stream.message().await? { 
    println!("Streamed Message: {:?}", response); 
}

Interceptors

Interceptors allow developers to add custom logic to the request/response lifecycle. This is useful for implementing functionalities like authentication, logging, and metrics collection without altering the core service logic.

Example: Logging Interceptor

fn log_request(request: Request<()>) -> Result<Request<()>, Status> { 
    println!("Incoming request: {:?}", request.metadata()); 
    Ok(request) 
} 
 
let greeter = MyGreeter::default(); 
let greeter_with_interceptor = GreeterServer::with_interceptor(greeter, log_request);

Performance and Production Readiness

Tonic is optimized for performance, making the most of Rust’s zero-cost abstractions and async runtime. gRPC, with its HTTP/2 foundation, provides multiplexing, efficient binary data transmission, and header compression. Combined with Tonic’s Rust implementation, users can expect low-latency and high-throughput communication.

For production readiness, it’s crucial to:

Thoroughly test your services.
Implement authentication and authorization mechanisms if needed.
Ensure error handling is robust and user-friendly.
Monitor your services using logging, metrics, and tracing.

Telemetry with tracing and metrics

Tonic, built on the tower service framework, naturally supports the tracing ecosystem. This allows users to gain deep insights into application behaviour, performance bottlenecks, and trace requests end-to-end.

To integrate tracing:

Add the dependencies:

tracing = "0.1" 
tracing-subscriber = "0.2"

2. Initialize your subscriber:

let subscriber = tracing_subscriber::fmt::Subscriber::builder() 
    .finish(); 
 
tracing::subscriber::set_global_default(subscriber) 
    .expect("Setting global default failed");

3. Add traces in your gRPC methods or interceptors.

Authentication with rust-jwt or rust-oauth2

Integrating JWT or OAuth2 can be achieved smoothly with Tonic’s interceptors to secure your services.

Example with JWT:

Add the jsonwebtoken crate.
In your interceptor, decode the JWT token from the metadata, validate its payload, and then decide to forward the request or reject it.

Custom Serialization with serde

While prost is the default serialization library Tonic uses, you might be in situations where custom serialization, perhaps with serde, is necessary. While this requires more manual steps, it's feasible by crafting custom codecs.

Tips for Deployment

While developing with Tonic is a pleasure, deploying gRPC services also requires some considerations:

Load Balancing: gRPC clients can intelligently route requests to backend services, but this requires the service to provide hints via the service config. Consider employing load balancers that understand gRPC.
TLS/SSL: Ensure your production gRPC services use SSL to encrypt communication. Tonic provides straightforward integration with rustls for this.
Versioning: gRPC services evolve. Always version your services and design them with backward compatibility in mind.
Health Checking: Implement the standard gRPC health checking protocol, so client applications and load balancers can understand the health of your service.

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All right, there we have it!

Happy coding, and keep those gears turning! 🦀🔧🚀