Should we provide batching across services?

@squee1945

This was brought up by @squee1945 in #557 (comment)

e.g., I can't batch a storage request together with a datastore request (please correct me if I'm wrong).

If we wanted to batch these together, the API might be pretty tricky, but could look like...

with gcloud.Batch() as batch:
  batch.datastore.put(...)
  batch.storage.upload_file(...)

I'm not sure how much value this adds, but wanted to discuss it in a separate issue so that we can make a decision...

My vote is: 👎 -- I don't think the value offsets the cost.

/cc @squee1945 @dhermes @tseaver

I think it's a bit worse even, it indicates that somehow the backends support grouped batching, but they don't. 👎 for me as well

Note that the endpoint API URL for batching is: https://www.googleapis.com/batch, which isn't visibly associated w/ storage. I don't know if that endpoint is able to process sub-requests which point into other services.

@dhermes

@dhermes, @jgeewax could we make every API-triggering method take an optional connection argument, which would override the bound / default connection for only that call? Seems like that would be a useful pattern across all services; it would also help mark those methods as being API/latency relevant.