Hands-On APIs for AI and Data Science

Chapter 6. Deploying Your API to the Cloud

It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.

Austin Kleon, Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Workman, 2014)

You have made great progress with your first API. You have selected the most important qualities for your users, developed multiple API endpoints, and created user-friendly documentation. In this chapter, you will publish your API to the cloud, where consumers can access it. This is another chance to share what you have been working on.

Benefits and Responsibilities of Cloud Deployment

The cloud is an informal term to refer to the collection of computer servers and connecting infrastructure that make the public internet. For a developer or data scientist, a great way to deploy prototypes and personal projects is through public cloud hosts. Before these became available, the process of running side projects was laborious and the capabilities were pretty limited. As a simple example, before cloud hosts became available to developers, hosting your software on a server required purchasing the physical server. When you finished with your project, you still had that server sitting around. With the cloud you can spin up a virtual server with a few commands, and when you are finished you can delete it. Now you have a great opportunity to deploy your work to a public cloud host with all of the networking and application hosting power that you can imagine ...