Designing, Building & Deploying an AI Chat App from Scratch (Part 1)
Microservices Architecture and Local DevelopmentPhoto by Danist Soh on UnsplashIntroductionThe aim of this project is to learn about the fundamentals of modern, scalable web applications by designing, building and deploying an AI-powered chat app from scratch. We won’t use fancy frameworks or commercial platforms like ChatGPT. This will provide a better understanding of how real-world systems may work under the hood, and give us full control over the language model, infrastructure, data and costs. The focus will be on engineering, backend and cloud deployment, rather than the language model or a fancy frontend.This is part 1. We will design and build a cloud-native app with several APIs, a database, private network, reverse proxy, and simple user interface with sessions. Everything runs on our local computer. In part 2, we will deploy our application to a cloud platform like AWS, GCP or Azure with a focus on scalability so actual users can reach it over the internet.A quick demo of the app. We start a new chat, come back to that same chat, and start another chat. We will now build this app locally and make it available at localhost.You can find the codebase at https://github.com/jsbaan/ai-app-from-scratch. Throughout this post I will link to specific lines of code with this hyperlink robot
Microservices Architecture and Local Development
Introduction
The aim of this project is to learn about the fundamentals of modern, scalable web applications by designing, building and deploying an AI-powered chat app from scratch. We won’t use fancy frameworks or commercial platforms like ChatGPT. This will provide a better understanding of how real-world systems may work under the hood, and give us full control over the language model, infrastructure, data and costs. The focus will be on engineering, backend and cloud deployment, rather than the language model or a fancy frontend.
This is part 1. We will design and build a cloud-native app with several APIs, a database, private network, reverse proxy, and simple user interface with sessions. Everything runs on our local computer. In part 2, we will deploy our application to a cloud platform like AWS, GCP or Azure with a focus on scalability so actual users can reach it over the internet.
You can find the codebase at https://github.com/jsbaan/ai-app-from-scratch. Throughout this post I will link to specific lines of code with this hyperlink robot
