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Mastering FastAPI for Machine Learning APIs

June 10, 2024

Mastering FastAPI for Machine Learning APIs

FastAPI has become the default for serving ML models in Python. It's async, type-safe, and produces OpenAPI docs for free.

A minimal model server

from fastapi import FastAPI
from pydantic import BaseModel

app = FastAPI()

class PredictRequest(BaseModel):
    text: str

@app.post("/predict")
async def predict(req: PredictRequest):
    return {"label": classify(req.text)}

Going to production

  • Use lifespan events to load models once at startup
  • Run behind uvicorn workers matched to CPU count
  • Batch requests at the application layer for throughput

That handful of patterns will take you most of the way to a production-ready inference service.