silly piping

[nilamo]

It depends on what you need. If waiting for it to finish is what you want, then that works great. If you want to work with data while another process generates it, so both run at the same time, then using a pipe (a named pipe, not communicate()) is the way to do that. Unless you care about scaling, in which case the two processes might be on different machines, in which case communication is done over sockets, databases, or named pipes.

Fun fact: you can create named pipes on a samba share. Samba is also one of the things you can use Microsoft Azure for, for free. Although a lot of internet providers block the smb protocol.