There are a few skills in software development that act as floodgates holding back a vast ocean of opportunity. When learning one of these skills, it seems that a whole new world is suddenly illuminated.

With this article, we will cover what I believe is one of these skills. The ability to write code that can be deployed to the internet and communicated with — an API.

Several sub-skills feed into building a deployable API, which we will cover as we put our API together. Nonetheless, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is mastery (nor even competency) — so this is not a zero-to-hero in five minutes article.

This article is an introduction, we will cover the essentials — nothing more, nothing less. At the end of the article, we will have a fully functional API hosted on the cloud.

In short, we will cover —

> Build an API with Flask
> Package our app with Docker
> Deploy with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
> Test with Postman

You can find the GitHub repo for this article here.

#flask #docker #google cloud #api