Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

Overview

Remote procedure call is a communication model that lets software invoke an operation on another process or machine as if calling a local function. An RPC framework defines method names, parameters, serialization, transport, responses, and errors. Interfaces should use explicit schemas, versioning, authentication, authorization, deadlines, size limits, and observability. Testing Remote Procedure Call (RPC) should include provider disagreement, reorganization or indexing delay, malformed data, and an unavailable node when relevant to the method.

Clients must distinguish transport errors from application failures and use bounded retries, while servers should expose stable error semantics and trace identifiers. A remote call differs fundamentally from a local function because networks introduce latency, timeouts, duplication, partial failure, version mismatch, and uncertain completion. RPC models interaction as invoking named procedures or methods, unlike resource-oriented REST, although either style can use HTTP and JSON. A Remote Procedure Call (RPC) client should validate network identity, units, encoding, and method semantics before acting on provider data.

An audit trail for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) should link the contract and client version, principal, request identifier, sanitized payload evidence, response, callbacks, retries, overrides, provider references, and final state. Implementations include JSON-RPC, gRPC, and custom protocols, supporting service-to-service calls, wallet operations, and blockchain node access. Observability for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) should correlate request ID, provider, method, latency, error code, block reference, and transaction state.

Error and authentication behavior also varies across frameworks.

The Remote Procedure Call (RPC) recovery procedure should distinguish a rejected RPC call from a transaction that was broadcast but not acknowledged.