1 A Tale of Two Technologies

Welcome to our book! In these pages we are going to explore two exploding technologies, Serverless Computing and Artificial Intelligence. We will do this from an engineering perspective. When we say an engineering perspective, we mean that this book will provide you with a practical hands on guide to get up and running with AI as a Service, without getting bogged down in a lot of theory.

We imagine that like most people, you will have heard of these topics and will be wondering why combine both of these seemingly disparate subjects into a single book? As we will see throughout the following chapters, the combination of these technologies has the potential to become the de-facto standard for enterprise and business to consumer platform development. It is a combination that will provide software developers and by implication the businesses they work for with enormous power to augment and improve existing systems and to rapidly develop and deploy new AI enabled platforms.

1.1   Cloud Landscape

1.2  What is Serverless?

1.3  The Need for Speed

1.3.1  The Early Days

1.3.2  The Unix Philosophy

1.3.3  Object Orientation and Patterns

1.3.4  Java, J2EE, .NET,

1.3.5  XML and SOA

1.3.6  Web Speed

1.3.7  Cloud Computing

1.3.8  Microservices (Re-Discovery)

1.3.9  Cloud Native Services

1.3.10  The Trend: Speed

1.4  What is AI?

1.4.1  History of AI

1.4.2  Real World AI

1.4.3  AI Services

1.4.4  AI and Machine Learning

1.4.5  Deep Learning

1.4.6  AI Challenges

1.5  The Democratization of Compute Power and Artificial Intelligence

1.6  Canonical AI as a Service architecture