Cloud platforms for deployment

The main idea behind this book is to empower you to build and deploy DL applications. In this section, we will discuss some critical components required to make your applications accessible to millions of users.

The best way to make your application accessible is to expose it as a web service, using REST or SOAP APIs. To do so, we have many Python web frameworks to choose from, such as web.py, Flask, Bottle, and many more. These frameworks allow us to easily build web services and deploy them.

Prerequisites

You should have a Google Cloud (https://cloud.google.com/) account. Google is promoting the usage of its platform right now, and is giving away $300 dollars of credit and 12 months as a free tier user.

Setting up the GCP

Follow these instructions to set up your GCP:

1. Creating a new project: Click on the three dots, as shown in the following screenshot, and then click on the + sign to create a new project:

2. Spinning a VM instance: Click on the three lines on the upper-left corner of the screen, select the compute option, and click on Compute Engine. Now choose Create new instance. Name the VM instance, and select your zone as us-west2b. Choose the machine type size.

   Choose your boot disk as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. In firewall options, choose both the http and https option (it's important to make it accessible from the outer world). To opt for GPU options, you can click on customize button, and find the GPU options. You can choose between two NVIDIA GPUs. Check both Allow HTTP traffic and Allow HTTPS traffic.

   Now click on Create. Boom! your new VM is getting ready.

3. Modify the firewall settings: Now click on the Firewall rules setting under Networking. Under Protocols and Ports, we need to select the port that we will use to export our APIs. We have chosen tcp:8080 as our port number. Now click on the Save button. This will assign a rule in the firewall of your VM to access the applications from the external world.

4. Boot your VM: Now start your VM instance. When you see the green tick, click on SSH—this will open a command window, and you are now inside the VM. You can also use gcloud cli to log in and access your VMs.

5. Then follow the same steps as we performed to set up the local environment, or read further to learn how to create an automation script that will perform all the setup automatically.

Now we need a web framework to write our DL applications as web services—again, there are lots of options, but to make it simple, we will be using a combination of web.py and Gunicorn.

If you want to know which web framework to choose based on memory consumption, CPU utilization, and so on, you can have a look at the comprehensive list of benchmarks at http://klen.github.io/py-frameworks-bench.

Let's install them using following commands:

pip install web.py
pip install gunicorn

Now we are ready to deploy our DL solution as a web service, and scale it to production level.