Before moving ahead, let's ensure we fulfill the technical requirements. The following subsections will go over the hardware and software requirements for this chapter.

For demonstration purposes, we used a basic configured machine with the following specification:

• Memory—16GB
• Processor—Intel Core i5
• CPU—2.30GHz x 4
• Graphics—Intel HD Graphics 520

The following are the software specifications:

• OS—Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• OS-Type—64 bit
• Python 3.6
• Python development packages: build...

Zappa is an open source tool that was developed and designed by Rich Jones, founder/CTO of Gun.io (https://www.gun.io/). Zappa was mainly designed to build and deploy serverless Python applications on AWS Lambda and API Gateway.  

Zappa is great for deploying serverless Python microservices with frameworks such as Flask and Bottle for hosting large web applications and CMSes with Django. You can also deploy any Python WSGI application as well.

In the previous chapter, we implemented the basic hello world microservice, using AWS Lambda and API Gateway. Zappa automates all these manual processes and gives us a handy tool to build and deploy Python applications.

It's as easy as this:

$ pip install zappa
$ zappa init
$ zappa deploy

As we described earlier, the tradition of web hosting is where the server needs to be always online, listening to HTTP requests...

Installing Zappa is a straightforward task, but before we move ahead, we need to configure the prerequisites. Make sure you have Python 2.7 or Python 3.6 and have a valid AWS account. Now, you need to configure the AWS credentials on your machine with help awscli:

$ pip install awscli

Configure the AWS credentials using the aws configure command, as shown in the following screenshot:

The configuration for AWS credentials requires that you have an AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key, Default region name, and a Default output format.

You can get AWS credential information from your My Security Credentials page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Once you've configured your AWS credentials, we can move ahead with Zappa's installation.

Zappa must be installed in a virtual environment. It's strongly recommended...

We are going to create a simple hello world program as a microservice using Python's Bottle framework. Let's follow some basic steps to configure a small project using the Bottle framework:

1. First, we will create a new project directory named lambda_bottle_poc:

   $ mkdir lambda_bottle_poc

2. Let's create a virtual environment inside the lambda_bottle_poc directory:

   $ virtualenv env -p python3.6

3. Here is the basic hello world program using the Bottle framework:

Now it's time to deploy the program as serverless on AWS Lambda and expose the /hello API via API Gateway. In the previous chapter, we described the manual process to deploy the Python application, using AWS console and AWS CLI, which was a really big challenge.

But with the help of Zappa, all manual processes of the AWS console and AWS...

Zappa covers each and every deployment process. Let's have a detailed discussion regarding the deployment flow with Zappa.

Once you are done with initializing Zappa, then you can deploy the application on to the production stage in a single command, as shown in the following code snippet:

$ zappa deploy production
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Deployment complete ! https://071h4br4e0.execute-api.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/production

When you call the $ zappa deploy command, Zappa performs some tasks to complete the deployment. The following is the internal flow and process of Zappa regarding deployment:

1. Compress the application code in your local environment into a ZIP archive by replacing any dependencies...

Zappa provides flexible features so that you can perform the deployment process. We covered the basic uses of Zappa and gained an understanding of the packaging and deployment process. Zappa makes it very simple and easy for developers to configure and perform the deployment of an application to a serverless environment.

1. What is Zappa?
2. How can we secure the application in AWS?