This will cover getting our backend API up and running!

If you missed part 1 and need to set up some your initial docker-compose file and directory structure, you can check that out here if you want.

FastAPI

Let’s start with FastAPI. FastAPI is a python framework that makes it super easy to stand up a REST API. But we can take a brief moment to evaluate it as a tool.

Pros:

• OpenAPI compliant (which means free Swagger documentation!)
• Support for typing (for IDE hints)
• Fast (per their documentation, as performant as NodeJS- and Go-based backends)

Cons:

• No native frontend built…

This will hopefully help you take out most of the guesswork of standing up a fully containerized, multi-page web application with a backing database.

What you know/aren’t scared by:

• Docker, Docker Compose
• Python (3.6+ because f-strings are *chef’s kiss*)
• JavaScript (at least a little, but this is an article about infra, not aesthetics)

What you will have by the end of this:

• A dynamic, multi-page frontend to display books
• A simple database to hold said books
• A clean REST API to shuttle information between the two
• All of the above, but also in containers

Good to go? Let’s get started…

I recently came across an issue where I had to stand up a scalable compute pipeline and make it easy to deploy for others to stand up themselves.

For a myriad of reasons (I won’t give you the story of the long road filled with tech hardships or any of that), I went with Terraform for my declarative infrastructure, AWS Batch for my compute, and AWS EFS as my storage. However, it was pretty annoying to get everything together because there’s not a ton of documentation on how to make it all work. So… eggs.

I’m going to describe how…