Building Intelligent Cloud Applications

Preface

The past few years have brought massive changes to the way we think about applications. As products scaled to a global level, developers worked hard to keep up, creating new paradigms that left behind the complex client–server systems that were then in place. The resulting systems are called serverless applications, and they will be the primary focus of this book.

Most applications require computing resources, databases, and hardware. The assumption behind a program in Django, for example, is that it will be deployed in an environment that is similar or superior to the environment in which it was coded. It’s also assumed that the program will be on all the time, using resources and running up a bill.

A serverless program is, in essence, a system that requires no infrastructure management, allowing the programmer to focus primarily on the business logic or functionality of the program. It is a bold change in the world of program design, and it’s becoming more and more popular.

To understand the implications of this model, you need to have an understanding of the basic ideas that underlie functional programming. We’ll review them in Chapter 2.

Intelligent Serverless Applications

There are many different meanings, often overlapping, attributed to the terms “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning.” In this book, we concern ourselves with the ways in which we can use algorithms to find patterns hidden in large datasets—patterns that would be difficult or impossible ...