Investigate gRPC performance and security for communicating between services

[cortadocodes]

@thclark and I have decided to use python-socketio to allow communication between services as it is simple to use and we already have an outline implementation. However, it is not secure by default and may not provide any compression of data, both of which will become a problem as we scale. To address this, we think we could replace the use of python-socketio with gRPC at some point in the future as it has security and compression built in. However, for the first iteration of inter-service communication, gRPC seems a little complex as it requires a .proto javascript-like file to define message types outside of python.

Useful links

gRPC

• Wiki
• Github page
• Python quick start
• Tutorial
• gRPC vs WebSocket

socket.io

• Wiki
• Docs