Accessing Cassandra with the Stargate gRPC APIs

gRPC is an HTTP/2 capable RPC (remote procedure call) API that uses binary protobuf payloads to improve data serialization performance. Common operational tasks (retries, load balancing, etc.) are handled automatically. Otherwise difficult capabilities like request/response multiplexing, streaming - and conveniences like HTTP header compression - are all just built-in. Great for high performance distributed systems and microservices.

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What Is gRPC?

gRPC is a modern, open source remote procedure call (RPC) framework that can run anywhere. It enables client and server applications to communicate transparently, making it easier to build connected systems. It’s commonly used for:

Low latency, highly scalable, distributed systems.
Developing mobile clients which are communicating to a cloud server.
Designing a new protocol that needs to be accurate, efficient and language independent.
Layered design to enable extension - eg. authentication, load balancing, logging, and monitoring.

Next concept: Why gRPC for Cassandra?

Why gRPC For Cassandra?

In general, you can expect native driver-level performance over HTTP(S)/2. gRPC handles a lot of networking and operational tasks automatically, so it’s easier to learn over DB-specific drivers. Stargate’s gRPC SDKs give Java, GoLang or Rust developers a supported connection option. For other languages without a supported driver, gRPC gives an option to create a client library.

Next concept: How to get the Stargate gRPC API

How To Get The Stargate gRPC API

Stargate is an open-source data gateway, and is automatically available in DataStax Astra. If you have an Astra database, the Stargate gRPC API is already enabled. If you have access to your own self-hosted Cassandra cluster, see the Stargate documentation for instructions on how to install and use the gRPC API. Stargate is also distributed with K8ssandra.io for Kubernetes users and included in DataStax Enterprise.

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