Running your CV API on EC2

Postman is an extremely useful app used to test APIs. We'll be using it to demonstrate our CV API

Step 1: Install Postman

Windows/Mac Users - https://www.getpostman.com/downloads/

Ubuntu - Open Ubuntu Software, search for Postman and install

Step 2: Setting up Postman for testing your EC2 API

Using Postman (see image above and the corresponding numbered steps below:

1. Change the protocol to POST

2. Enter the Public IP Address of your EC2 Instance: http://18.224.96.38

3. Change Tab to Body

4. Select the form-data radio button

5. From the drop down, select Key type to be file

6. For Value, select one of our test images

7. Click send to send our image to our API

8. Our response will be shown in the window below.

The output is JSON file containing:

{
    "MainColor": "Red",
    "catOrDog": "Cat"
}

The cool thing about using Postman is that we can generate the code to call this API in several different languages:

See blue box to bring up the code box:

Code Generator

Note: To keep our API running constantly launch the python code using this instead:

sudo nohup python3 forms.py & screen

Conclusion

So you've just successfully deployed a Computer Vision Web App and API that can be used by users anywhere in the world! This facilitates many possibilities from developing Mobile Apps, startup products and research tools. However, it should be noted there are many improvements that can be made:

• Saving our uploaded image to as S3 Bucket. We don't want to store all these images on our API server and it wasn't designed for mass storage. It's quite easy to configure and S3 bucket and store all uploaded images there. If privacy is a concern we can forget that entirely and use Python to delete the image after it's been processed.

• Using Nginx or Gunicorn or something similar to be the main server for our API

• Using a more scalable design (this far from my expertise, but if you ever wanted to support simultaneous users, you'll need to make some adjustments.