In the previous chapter, we created a REST API that served our prediction model forecasts by managing our own server and application. While that approach is by far the most popular, there is another that is also very useful for specific tasks—using serverless applications.

In this chapter, we will use the Chalice Python package to build an API that's similar to the one we built in Chapter 18, Serving Models with a RESTful API, but it will run in the cloud as a serverless application. Along the way, we will discuss along the way all the pros and cons of this approach.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following:

• What a serverless application is
• How to build a simple application using the Chalice package
• How to mitigate Chalice's limitations
• Scheduling a serverless process
• Deploying a larger-than-limit application with Zappa