Lab 6 Comparing REST and gRPC remote procedure calls Solution

This lab designed to help you understand the difference between REST and gRPC APi's. You will develop a REST and a gRPC api then compare the performance for latency / bandwidth.




API endpoints / services




You need to construct a server and client for the REST and gRPC services. Part of the REST server and a prototype client has been provided for you because there are some complexities in loading and processing an image in Python and transporting a image datatype in JSON.




The first services is an `add` service that takes two integers, sums them and returns the sum. This service is designed to emphasize "light weight" remote procedure calls where latency is of paramount concern because the overhead dwarfs the data transmitted or the operation being performed.




The second service is an `image` service that takes an image (in JPG or PNG format) and returns the `width` and `height` of the the image.




REST Implementation




File `server.py` is the starter code for the Flask server in Python.




We've provided the endpoint `/api/image`, which is a POST method taking a body containing an image. It returns a response containing a JSON document providing the 'width' and 'height' of the image that was provided. The Python Image Library (pillow) is used to process the image.




See `README-REST-details.md` for more details about building the REST API.




gRPC implementation




We're not providing any starter code for the gRPC implementation. You should [go through the gRPC tutorial](https://grpc.io/docs/tutorials/basic/python/) to walk through the steps of writing a protocol buffers specification that matches the `services` provided by the REST API.




Again, you should construct both a client and a server application where you can run tests for a varying number of times to record the milliseconds needed to perform a single operation.




See `README-gRPC-details.md` for more details about building the gRPC API.




Conducting your measurements




Once you've gotten your code working, you should create two VM instances (a single-core VM is enough). Both instances should be in the `us-west1-a` zone (the [documentation on regions and zones is useful here](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/#zones_and_clusters)).




Pro Tip:

This could a great time to create an instance, configure the instance by installing the needed python libraries, take a snapshot and then create the second instance from the snapshot. Or, you can use your lab5 snapshot which already has Flask installed.







For the first test, you should run the server and client code on the same host, specifying 'localhost' as the endpoint. If you run about 1000 queries, you should find that the REST code takes ~2ms per add query.




For the second test, you should run the server and client on different hosts within the same zone. You should find that the REST code takes about the same time as the localhost implementation.




For the third test, you should create a new server in the `europe-west3-a` zone (Frankfurt) and test the client/server speed. You may need to adjust the numbe of repitions you measure based on the latency you encounter). You'll find that the REST add api takes ~270ms rather than 2ms. You may need to adjust the number of repititions you do to keep the running time managable (do at least 100 resp).




In each case, you should use the **internal IP address** rather than than the external IP address for the hosts (i.e. a 10.x.y.z address)




Then, repeat the same three measurements using the gRPC method.




When you're done, edit a file `SOLUTION.md` that includes a table showing the time per-method for each of the RPC mechanisms as below.







| Method | Local | Same-Zone | Different Region |

|--- |--- |--- |--- |--- |

| REST add | | | |

| gRPC add | | | |

| REST img | | | |

| gRPC img | | | |

| PING | | | |

You should measure the basic latency using the `ping` command - this can be construed to be the latency without any RPC or python overhead.




You should examine your results and provide a short paragraph with your observations of the performance difference between REST and gRPC as described in `SOLUTIONS.md`.