Microservices Communication: gRPC vs REST, Message Queues, and Sagas

Introduction The moment you split a monolith into microservices, communication becomes your biggest challenge. In a monolith, a function call is nanoseconds, type-safe, and transactional. In microservices, every interaction is a network call that can fail, timeout, arrive out of order, or silently duplicate. The communication patterns you choose determine your system's reliability, latency, and operational complexity. This guide covers the practical decisions you face when designing microservice