OpenAI API Cookbook

5

Staging the OpenAI API for Application Development

So far, we have used the OpenAI API by connecting directly to OpenAI’s endpoint and making a request. When building applications and workflows, however, it is not typical to connect directly to OpenAI. Instead, developers tend to stage and call OpenAI’s API from their own backend APIs, which then return information to the application.

Essentially, there is a layer between the frontend of an application and the OpenAI API, as depicted in Figure 5.1. This layer normally processes requests from the frontend, calls the OpenAI API (or a series of other endpoints), receives the completion, processes it, and then returns the data back to the frontend. We will refer to this layer as the backend layer ...