You may ask if it is possible to implement reactive microservices with a REST API or a traditional web API. Of course—yes! You can do it one of two ways:
- There are gateways that translate REST requests to JSON-RPC or other protocols. For example, gRPC has one ready to use: https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway. You can even write your own gateway—it's not so hard for simple or specific cases.
- You can use a Web API to send messages from one server to another. A microservice doesn't have to have a single API path, but you can add a special handler for messages in JSON or other formats. For transport, you can use not only HTTP, but also the WebSocket protocol.