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Firefly

Deploying functions made easy!

The problem

How to expose a function as an API for others to use?

Why?

  • To use it in a different environment
  • Loose coupling

Use cases

  • Deploy a machine learning model
  • preprocess an image
  • live price check

Challenges

  • Requires writing a web application
  • What about authentication?
  • How to do data validation?
  • How I need write a client library too?

Welcome to Firefly

Deploying functions made easy!

Code

Write your function:

# sq.py
def square(n):
	return n*n

Run

Start web service:

$ firefly sq.square
[INFO] Starting gunicorn 19.7.1
[INFO] Listening at: http://127.0.0.1:8000
...

Use

And use it with a client.

>>> from firefly.client import Client
>>> client = Client("http://127.0.0.1:8000")
>>> client.square(n=4)
16

Behind the scenes, it is a RESTful API.

$ curl -d '{"n": 4}' http://127.0.0.1:8000/square
16

And supports any JSON-friendly datatype.

More practical example

Deploying a machine learning model.

# model.py

import pickle
model = pickle.load('model.pkl')

def predict(features):
	result = model.predict(features])
	return int(result[0])

Run the server using:

$ firefly model.predict
...

And use it in the client:

>>> remote_model = Client("http://localhost:8080/")
>>> remote_model.predict(features=[5.9, 3, 5.1, 1.8]))
2

Authentication

Firefly has built-in support for autentication.

$ firefly --token abcd1234 sq.square
...

The client must pass the same token to autenticate it.

>>> client = Client("http://127.0.0.1:8000", auth_token="abcd1234")
>>> client.square(n=4)
16

Upcoming Features...

  • supporting other input and output content-types in addition to json. (for example, a function to resize an image)
  • validation using type annotations
  • caching support

It's open source!

https://github.com/rorodata/firefly

To install:

pip install firefly-python

Resources