Making asynchronous HTTP requests from a flask service
You can use eventlets for the the second use case. It's pretty easy to do:
import eventletproviders = [EventfulPump(), MeetupPump()]try: pool = eventlet.GreenPool() pile = eventlet.GreenPile(pool) for each in providers: pile.spawn(each.get, [], 5, loc) # call the interface methodexcept (PumpFailure, PumpOverride): return abort(503)results = []for res in pile: results += resYou can wrap each of your api endpoints in a class that implements a "common interface" (in the above it is the get method) and you can make the calls in parallel. I just place them all in a list.
Your other use case is harder to accomplish in straight python. At least a few years ago you would be forced to introduce some sort of worker process like celery to get something like that done. This question seems to cover all the issues:
Making an asynchronous task in Flask
Perhaps things have changed in flask land?