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Topic 7: Capstone

Now with all those cloud skills you have gained, it is time to deploy the API you built in Phase 2 Capstone. You are going to deploy a FastAPI application and a PostgreSQL database on a VM within a Cloud network. Configure networking, security groups, and access controls to allow secure communication between the servers while restricting unauthorized access.

Capstone Steps​

  1. Create Your Cloud Infrastructure:

    • Set up a cloud network with public and private subnets.
    • Launch two VMs: one for the API Server (FastAPI) and one for the PostgreSQL database.
    • Configure security groups to allow necessary access between the API and database.
    • Configure gateways for internet access.

  2. Prepare Your API Data (FastAPI):

    • Set up SSH keys on the API Server to securely clone the GitHub repository.
    • Configure environment variables for database connection details.
    • Verify the API is up and running by testing the public IP.
    • Configure an Elastic IP for a persistent public IP address for the API server.

    your environment variables should look like this

    POSTGRES_HOST=<replace_with_your_private_ip>
    POSTGRES_PORT=5432
    POSTGRES_USER=<name_of_postgres_user>
    POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<password_of_user>
    POSTGRES_DB=<name_of_db>
    DATABASE_URL= postgresql://<name_of_postgres_user>:<password_of_user>@<replace_with_your_private_ip>:5432/<name_of_db>

  3. Prepare Your Database (PostgreSQL):

    • Install PostgreSQL on the Database Server VM.
    • Configure secure remote access to the database server using SSM, Azure Bastion
    • Allow installation of dependencies from the internet.
    • Configure it to accept connections from the API Server by modifying the pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf files.
    • Create the database and user needed for FastAPI to connect.
    • Create the entries table within the database.

  4. Test API-Database Communication:

    • Ensure the API is correctly interacting with the PostgreSQL database by testing read and write operations.

    • Test the different Endpoints using this format

      http://<elastic-ip>:<port-number>/<api-endpoint>```

      ```eg
      http://52.32.59.145:8000/entries

    • Verify that data is being correctly stored and retrieved from the database.