gRPC behind a firewall

[Vitor Henrique]

Hello Everyone

I have a question and would love if someone can point me in the right direction.

I have a system that is comprised of a web server (written in python) and some companion workers.

Those workers are currently also written in python, but planned to be migrated to golang.

My goal is from a webpage, for some user action start a process on the workers and get the results back to the user.

Example, the user wants to ping a machine on a local network where the agent is installed, so it would go on the webpage, press few buttons to ping a specific machine, that would send a command to the local agent, that would ping the machine, and return the results of the ping to the webpage. Those workers sit behind a firewall and don't have a public ip address.

We have implemented a custom websocket routine, that we basically accomplish this, but it is very hacky.

I saw few posts and few discussions threads that apparently accomplish this two way communication with grpc, they talk about `publicly accessible endpoint` or using a websocket, but I have zero experience with grpc, I would appreciate pointing me on any direction.

The threads that I found so far are:

- https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues/484

- https://github.com/dustin-decker/grpc-firewall-bypass

- https://github.com/glerchundi/grpc-boomerang

Initially I would like to code everything on python, a python service that sits behind the firewall that can be reached from a server sitting on the cloud, it is the language that we have more experience and migrate this to golang in a near future.

If someone finds this exciting and wants to know more about it, we can turn this into a full time job as well, the company that I work for is called Lancium, a quick intro to us: https://youtu.be/HitXbCNngHM

We are located in Houston, TX.