Calling Go from Python via gRPC

This repo is an example to show how to make remote procedure calls via gRPC between Python and Go. TLS (multi) is used to secure the network communication.

Read this article for a complete walk-through.

Quickstart

• install direnv as a shell extension
• run direnv allow
• install Python and Go (1.18)
• run make setup
• open two terminal windows and run respectively:
  • make server
  • make client
• run make stop to shutdown the server
• run make clean to remove the installed binaries

The example

Basic explanation. Imagine you have a web mapping platform like Google Maps, you may have some satellites scanning the Earth and storing the data on a server, and clients performing some queries to the server to get the view of a location. For simplicity, assume you already have a 80x32 (width, height) 2D map of the Earth stored on the server. The goal is to support queries to get the image associated with the xy coordinate of a location, and also queries to get the view associated with a broader rectangular area delimited by the xy coordinates associated with its bottom-left and top-right corners. Also, you may want to encrypt the communication between client and server to counter eavesdropping and ensure no third-parties are able to perform MITM attacks (i.e., like replacing the image associated with a coordinate).