Deployment

As my daily job focuses on model development, I do not have as much experience in deployment (and that is the reason why I am spending weekend to write this blog). For someone like me, the learning curve may be too sharp if tring to learn everything at once. But if you take steps, every step is really easy. Here are the steps I followed to deploy deep learning model in Heroku.

Step 0: Learn HTML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Every webpage you look at is written in a language called HTML. You can think of HTML as the skeleton that gives every webpage structure. If you do not know about HTML, take a codeacademy's course about HTML & CSS (Free) and try your best to go as far as possible (until you get bored).

Step 1: Learn Flask

Flask is a micro web framework written in Python. For a quick start, follow this tutorial, it will let you create your first Flask web application and run it locally on your own computer in 10 minutes.

Step 2: Learn Jinja2

jinja2 is a popular templating engine for Python. A web templating system combines a template with a certain data source to render dynamic web pages. With jinja2, you can pass variable between your python script and html. I recommend you to read Template Designer Documentation. If you are too lazy to read it, here is the quick cheat sheet for its syntax:

• {% ... %} for Statements
• {{ ... }} for Expressions to print to the template output
• {# ... #} for Comments not included in the template output
• # ... ## for Line Statements

Step 3: Learn Heroku

In Step 1, you already run the web application locally on your computer. With a cloud service like Heroku, you are able to put your websites onto the public World Wide Web, with a publicly accessible URL. This datademofun's github repo seems the simplest walkthrough on how to get set up with Heroku, its toolkit and then how to deploy a simple web application (for free) on the Heroku Cloud.

Step 4: Learn Heroku + deep learning

My Flask app related codes are created by modifying datademofun's github repo. While datademofun's Flask app only requires Flask and gunicorn, I need some additional python modules for pre processing data and to use deep learning functions. My requirements.txt contains: You see that I have tensorflow as one of the requirements.txt but not Keras, my favorite deep learning framework. This is because I could not import Keras: As the Flask application with Keras worked locally in my computer but failed in Heroku, I believe that this was Hiroku related problem. More specifically, using Heroku, I could add it as one of the requirements.txt but when I add a line "import keras" in backend.py, the application failed with H13 error. What is the H13 error?

Here is a quote from H13 - Connection closed without response.

This error is thrown when a process in your web dyno accepts a connection, but then closes the socket without writing anything to it.... One example where this might happen is when a Unicorn web server is configured with a timeout shorter than 30s and a request has not been processed by a worker before the timeout happens. In this case, Unicorn closes the connection before any data is written, resulting in an H13.

I solved this problem in very hacky way: I imported Keras through tensorflow. You can see this in my backend.py: I agree this is not a very good solution but it was a quick go around!