In this chapter and in chapter 3 we will focus on building our first AI-enabled serverless system. By the end, you will have configured and deployed to the cloud a small system that is capable of reading and recognizing images from a web page and displaying the results for review. This may sound like an awful lot of work for a single chapter and indeed, before the advent of Serverless and off-the-shelf AI, the progress that we will make in this chapter would have taken a small team of engineers many person-months to complete. As Isaac Newton stated, we stand on the shoulders of giants! In this chapter we will stand on the shoulders of countless software engineers and AI experts to rapidly assemble our “hello world” system.
If you are new to AWS and serverless technology, there is an awful lot to take in over the course of these two chapters. Our aim is go slowly and to provide a lot of detail in order to bring everyone up to speed. We will take a “paint by numbers” approach, so if you follow the code and deployment instructions carefully, you should be just fine.