Server – the web traffic controller
To run our prediction service, we need to communicate with external systems to receive requests to train a model, score new data, evaluate existing performance, or provide model parameter information. The web server performs this function, accepting incoming HTTP requests and forwarding them on to our web application either directly or through whatever middleware may be used.
Though we could have made many different choices of server in illustrating this example, we have chosen the CherryPy library because unlike other popular servers such as Apache Tomcat or Nginx, it is written in Python (allowing us to demonstrate its functionality inside a notebook) and is scalable, processing many requests in only a few milliseconds (http://www.aminus.org/blogs/index.php/2006/12/23/cherrypy_3_has_fastest_wsgi_server_yet.). The server is attached to a particular port, or endpoint (this is usually given in the format url:port), to which we direct requests that are then...
