Week 2: AI in the Cloud

This week, students will focus on compute resources (virtual machines) and deploy an AI application using Azure Open AI.

Focus

• Learn the role of cloud-based compute (e.g., virtual machines)
• Understand how cloud infrastructure can support real-world apps (in this case an AI app)
• Practice deploying and running live applications in the cloud

Hands-On Activities

• Use shared credentials to provision an Azure VM
• Install required packages and libraries on the VM
• Deploy a streamlit (or dash) app powered by the Azure OpenAI API
• Make the app publicly accessible via a web browser

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this week, students will be able to:

• Provision and configure a virtual machine in Azure using shared access
• Deploy and serve a real Python app using:
• Dash or streamlit for frontend interactivity
• Azure OpenAI for AI-powered responses
• Access their live app from a public URL

Resources

• Provision a Linux VM in Azure
• Azure OpenAI Quickstart
• Creating a domain name based on VM

Instructor Notes

Make sure API keys (for Azure OpenAI) are stored securely, not hardcoded (this is something students will have learned about already in the AI module, which precedes the cloud module).