Combining a daemon with a REST API

I'm working on a daemon that I can run in a container which will continuously grab live data and feed it to redis to be consumed by other parties, and I have been intending to attach a REST API which would provide info on the status of the redis connection and allow the daemon to be instructed to publish to other redis instances aswell.

After getting a basic API running with the python module falcon, I realised that this daemon will now need to be doing two things at the same time, and so I will need to use several threads, or some other asynchronous mechanism.

This raises two questions:

1) Is this construction of combining a continuous daemon and a REST API a common or sensible decision? It seems valuable to me to be able to interact with the daemon in a network based way, to allow stronger integration tests etc., but maybe this is overkill and more trouble than it's worth? The alternative I guess is to configure it via a config file and monitor its health based on the output data.

2) If I were to go ahead with this choice, what is the most sensible choice of framework for achieving the dual behaviour, threading or asyncio? Maybe there is no major difference, but I'd love to hear a suggestion or two.

Many thanks, Kerzane.

• 1) I think that make sense an async REST API for the behaviour you want to obtain, something like a POST/PUT for publishing/inserting/starting analysis and a GET for retrieve status and other informations could be a good decision, for some alternative approach take a look to gRPC, but I'm not sure if can be useful for your case.
• 2)The main differences are that: usually asyncio is much more performant as is going at "hardware" level instead of "application" one that is used by threading lib; for the same reason threading give you "more controll" over the threads, instead of asyncio that is managing for you some advanced details. There could be some over semplifications in my sentences, I suggest you to read those articles: https://medium.com/@nhumrich/asynchronous-python-45df84b82434, https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/asyncio-threading-and-multiprocessing-in-python-4f5ff6ca75e8, https://towardsdatascience.com/a-better-way-for-asynchronous-programming-asyncio-over-multi-threading-3457d82b3295 and also to read all the documentation of the two libreries for a better understanding of the various use cases.