How Remote Procedure Call Works

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) enables services to communicate efficiently by making remote function calls feel like local ones. The protocol uses client stubs and server skeletons to handle marshaling, network transmission, and unmarshaling automatically. Key failure handling strategies include timeouts, retries with idempotency safeguards, circuit breakers, and deadline propagation. Real-world implementations require service discovery, backward-compatible API evolution, streaming support, and standardized error codes. While RPC offers high performance and simple programming models through frameworks like gRPC, it creates tight coupling and requires specialized tooling compared to REST APIs.