Comparative Study of REST and gRPC for Microservices in Established Software Architectures

Abstract: This study compares two commonly used communication architectural styles for distributed systems, REST and gRPC. With the increase of microservice usage when migrating from monolithic structures, the importance of network performance plays a significantly larger role. Companies rely on their users, and they demand higher performance for applications to enhance their experience. This study aims to determine which of these frameworks performs faster in different scenarios regarding response time. We performed four tests that reflect real-life scenarios within an established API and baseline performance tests to evaluate them. The results imply that gRPC performs better than REST the larger the size of transmitted data is. The study provides a brief understanding of how REST performs compared to newer frameworks and that exploring new options is valuable. A more in-depth evaluation is needed to understand the different factors of performance influences further.