For internal communication between CoreMedia CMCC components, gRPC has been added as an alternative to CORBA. Communication via CORBA is still available and the default. As long as you plan to stick with CORBA, no changes to your code or operations procedures are required. Should you want to switch to gRPC as your communications protocol between CMCC components, the following sections will provide information and pointer for additional details to do so.

In the course of adding gRPC as a communications protocol, however, breaking changes were introduced:

Upgrade Information

Note

With release 2512.0 of the CoreMedia system, the Workflow Server does not yet offer gRPC services to its clients. Activating gRPC on clients (for example, Studio Server or command line tools) won't do any harm as long as these are of release 2512.0, too. Future clients, though, will fail to connect to that Workflow Server if gRPC is active on them.

Keep this in mind when operating a mixed-release CoreMedia system setup. In such scenarios (for example, during upgrades), it is recommended to leave clients in their default protocol mode CORBA.

While servers always offer both protocols for clients to connect, clients can be configured to use either gRPC or CORBA. The protocol can be chosen freely on each start of a component. Currently, CORBA is the default protocol.

Note that Content Servers and the Workflow Server also contain client parts for internal communication, for example, for internal repository access, publication or replication. Choosing a protocol on a server therefore does make a difference although services offered by the servers to their clients always cover both protocols.

Information for Developers

See Section 3.2.2, “Docker Compose Setup” in Blueprint Developer Manual , Section 4.3, “Build and Run the Applications” in Blueprint Developer Manual on how to activate gRPC in a development setup. Refer to Unified API Developer Manual, Section 4.1.1, “Creating a Connection” in Unified API Developer Manual for details on connection parameters for gRPC.

Information for Operations Engineers

See Section 4.4, “Communication between the System Applications” in Operations Basics for details on how to configure and secure gRPC communication in your environment.

Replicator and Publisher require specific configuration for gRPC:

In a Nutshell

Adjust hostnames and ports in the following variables to your setup where necessary. Mind that there is no scheme to the gRPC addresses as those are not URIs.

To enable gRPC communication for the Content Management Server, set the following environment variables on the Content Management Server process:

To enable gRPC communication for a Replication Live Server, set the following environment variables on the Replication Live Server process:

To enable gRPC communication for a Master Live Server, just set

To enable gRPC communication for the command line tool publishall, see the new command line options in Section 3.13.3.5, “Publishall” in Content Server Manual.