This chapter covers:
- Building a first simple AI as a Service system
- Setting up the cloud environment
- Setting up a local development environment
- Consuming an AI image recognition service
- Implementing synchronous and asynchronous services
- Deploying to the cloud
In this chapter we will focus on building our first Serverless AI system. By the end you will have configured and deployed a small system to the cloud 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.
We will take a 'paint by numbers' approach in this chapter and will go fairly quickly. As you progress through these pages, no doubt several questions will pop into your head, such as 'how do I debug this?' of 'how should I unit test this?'. Rest assured that we will provide much more detailed in subsequent chapters, for now grab some coffee and buckle up!