py-tonic

POC (for now) of a gRPC server made in Rust (based on Tonic+PYO3 crates) to server Python code.

CONTRIBUTORS AND IDEAS WELCOMED!!

Idea

Spin up a gRPC server that runs natively but with the ability to invoke business logic written in Python.

Main idea comes from an async HTTP framework (https://github.com/hopeit-git/hopeit.engine) where business logic is defined in separated python files, and the framework integrates the HTTP serving+logging+metrics to make life easy for Python developers when creating Microservices or dealing with async scenarios.

Use Cases

• Machine Learning model serving (where serving logic needs to be written in Python)
• Real time calculations using Python libraries + existing code
• Helping Data Scientists to create decent performance services
• Ideally user should not need to learn Rust

Test

• Create a python environment with python 3.7+ (i.e. conda environment)
• Have rust nightly installed
• Run

./test.sh 3 python

This will:

• Build py-tonic binaries and create symlink
• Start a server by running python/main.py
• Start 3 clients (generated in Rust using tonic)
• Invoke for each request, python\steps.py using the module app/event.py

TODOs:

• Rust generated classes from hw.proto needs to be manually replicated to be used in Python in order to use #[pyclass] macro. This should be automated (generated classes should be python compatible or new classes should be automaticaly created with impl From).
• Code generation from proto schemas done using build.rs could be triggered from python.
• steps.py is used to make python code compatible with hopeit.engine, but we might can simplify this por this project just to serve a single python function since loading both steps.py and the actual code to run seems to be a performance bottleneck.
• Python modules could be statically loaded at start time (needs to be Boxed)
• One Python package per each rcp service, One Python file per each rpc endpoint. Names could be infered from proto schema.
• Add metrics to the service (similar at what's done in client.rs)
• do not use "expect"
• ... add more ideas ...