Why Implement a Recommendation Engine as a Web Service? separation of concerns interface familiar to devs ML models can be built & retrained outside of the main app's release cycle the algorithm underlying the RE can be revised or replaced without change to the interface (it's a module import) RESTFUL routing is a nice way to implement "context"-dependence without requiring supplied parameters ====== to get a recommendation, just curl at an endpoint: curl http://my-recommender.com/routebeer/route66?user_id=43563