Grpc Example

gRPC server with REST interface

As I way to brush up on modern Web API technologies, I took a stab at setting up a Python gRPC server with a Go proxy providing a REST API. These are technologies I looked into and used before, but nothing like starting from scratch to really learn the details.

I just checked in my initial implementation at https://github.com/thiagorobert/grpc-example. Take a look at the README for instructions on how to use the code. It’s interesting that most of it is actually automatically generated from the Protocol Buffer definition.

Frankly, there’s a lot of docs on this out there, but if it wasn’t for my previous experience at Google (where everything is implemented using Protocol Buffers), this would have been a lot harder to get working.

Next steps (and foreshadowing of future posts):

1. Create a Dockerfile to package dependencies, code generation, service startup.
2. Deploy it via AWS Fargate and make the service (both gRPC and REST interfaces) available at thiago.pub.
3. Change the code so it provides useful (or at least interesting) Space-related functionality.

1 and 2 above are things I’ve done before, and 3 will help me learn more about different Space-related libraries available out there (e.g., Astropy).