I have heard about AWS Lambda and all the cool things happening in the serverless world. I have also deployed Go functions using the Apex framework for serverless deployment. But recently I have started working on some Python projects again and decided to see how well the Python community is adapting to the serverless era. Not to my surprise, the Python community is doing great as usual. I quickly found an awesome framework named Zappa which makes deploying Python code to AWS Lambda very easy. Python is already natively supported on the AWS Lambda platform. But with the native support you need to configure the API Gateway, S3 bucket and other stuff on your own. Thanks to Zappa, these things are now automated to our convenience. We can easily deploy WSGI apps as well. That means, we can now take our Flask / Django / API Star apps and deploy them to AWS Lambda – with ease and simplicity. In this blog post, I will quickly walk through how to deploy a flask based rest api to the serverless cloud. If you want to learn more about API integration you can look for Jitterbit.
Setup Flask App
Before we can get started, we need to create a simple flask app. Here’s a quick rest api (that doesn’t do much):
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from flask import Flask, jsonify app = Flask(__name__) @app.route('/') def hello_world(): return jsonify({"message": "Hello World!"}) |
Let’s save the above code in app.py. We can now install Flask using pip:
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pip install flask |
And then run the code:
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FLASK_APP=app.py flask run |
This should run our app and we should be able to visit http://127.0.0.1:5000/ to see the output.
Setting Up AWS
Please make sure you have an account for AWS where you have added your credit card and completed the sign up process. AWS Lambda has 1 million free requests per month which is promised to be always free (not for the first 12 months or anything). When you add your card, you shall also be eligible for a free tier of S3 for 12 months. So you won’t be charged for trying out a sample app deployment. So don’t worry about adding a card. In fact, adding a card is a requirement for getting the free tier.
Once you have your AWS account setup, click on your name (top right) and click “My Security Credentials”. From there, choose the “Access Keys” section and generate a new pair of key and secret. Store them in your ~/.aws/credentials file. AWS Cli (and Zappa) will use these to connect to AWS services and perform required actions. The file should look like this:
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[default] aws_access_key_id=[...] aws_secret_access_key=[...] [masnun] aws_access_key_id=[...] aws_secret_access_key=[...] |
I have created two profiles here. Named profiles are useful if you have more than one accounts/projects/environments to work with. After adding the credentials, add the region information in ~/.aws/config:
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[default] region=us-west-2 output=json [profile masnun] region=us-east-2 output=text |
This will mostly help with choosing the default region for your app. Once you have these AWS settings configured, you can get started with Zappa.
Install and Configure Zappa
First install Zappa:
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pip install zappa |
Now cd into the project directory (where our flask app is). Then run:
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zappa init |
Zappa should guide you through the settings it needs. It should also detect the Flask app and auto complete the app (app.app ) for you. Once the wizard finishes, you’re ready to deploy your API.
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zappa deploy dev |
This should now deploy the app to the dev stage. You can configure different stages for your app in Zappa settings. Once you make some code changes, you can update the app:
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zappa update |
Both of these commands should print out the url for the app. In my case, the url is: https://1gc1f80kb5.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/dev 🙂
What’s Next?
Congratulations, you just deployed a Flask rest api to AWS Lambda using Zappa. You can make the url shorter by pointing a domain to it from your AWS console. To know more about Zappa and all the great things it can do, please check out Zappa on Github.