South India is blessed with nature throughout the year, but monsoons bring a different flavor and ethereal quality to some places. Although the rainy season might not be the best time to travel, there is a certain charm in holidaying during the downpour. We (I and my flatmates in Bengaluru) were planning a trip to Chikmagalur since the beginning of June. One of my friends knows driving, so we decided to rent a car and drive ourselves to a distance of approximately 250 KMs.

I finished my last post with the following issue - Now, here one problem arises, how to make sure that the search results will not return any book which the user is not authorized to access. We will solve this problem using OPA in the next and last post of this series. Let’s solve this issue now. We will use OPA’s declarative language, Rego, to implement policies which will decide on the basis of some user-provided data, which all objects are to be returned to the user.

In the last post, we discussed about the structure of our library application. In this post, we will define the data definitions using protobuf, and then we will use these definitions to create a Go service. We will also add a REST interface to the service. So let’s get started. Defining Proto Definitions gRPC uses protocol buffers for serializing structured data. To define the structure of the data that you want to serialize, we use a proto file - it is a simple text file that contains all the logical pieces of your data in the form of messages, and the methods that will be called over the network.

TL;DR – In a series of blog posts, I will be implementing a simple library application supporting both gRPC and REST interfaces using Go, gRPC, and OPA. My approach might not be the most optimal one, but I am learning these technologies currently. Please give your valuable suggestions and be kind :) I have been learning the basics of microservices and Golang lately. On the work front, I got a chance to work on Go, gRPC, and Open Policy Agent as my first professional project.

The year 2018 has been quite a roller coaster year for me. I saw many ups and downs, many successes, and many failures faced many challenges on the personal front and struggled to keep myself on track. I have been working hard on improving my lifestyle (not materialistically) for the last few years, and the benefits have begun to show up now. This year was a pinnacle in that aspect. A lot of micro changes happened in my life this year.