Deploying a Flask API

This is the project involves: Server Deployment, Containerization, and Testing.

It is containerized and deployed as a Flask API to a Kubernetes cluster using Docker, AWS EKS, CodePipeline, and CodeBuild.

The Flask app that is used for this project consists of a simple API with three endpoints:

• GET '/': This is a simple health check, which returns the response 'Healthy'.
• POST '/auth': This takes a email and password as json arguments and returns a JWT based on a custom secret.
• GET '/contents': This requires a valid JWT, and returns the un-encrpyted contents of that token.

The app relies on a secret set as the environment variable JWT_SECRET to produce a JWT. The built-in Flask server is adequate for local development, but not production, so the production-ready Gunicorn server is used to deploy the app.

Dependencies

• Python 3.7

  • Follow instructions to install the latest version of python for your platform in the [python docs] (https://docs.python.org/3/using/unix.html#getting-and-installing-the-latest-version-of-python)

• Docker Engine

  • Installation instructions for all OSes can be found here.
  • For Mac users, if you have no previous Docker Toolbox installation, you can install Docker Desktop for Mac. If you already have a Docker Toolbox installation, please read this before installing.

• AWS Account

  • You can create an AWS account by signing up here.

Project Steps

Completing the project involved several steps:

1. Write a Dockerfile for a simple Flask API
2. Build and test the container locally
3. Create an EKS cluster
4. Store a secret using AWS Parameter Store
5. Create a CodePipeline pipeline triggered by GitHub checkins
6. Create a CodeBuild stage which will build, test, and deploy your code