Pepper & Carrot AI-powered flipbook · Part 15 — Containerize and Deploy: Shipping to Fly.io + Cloudflare Pages, Then Verifying
Post 15 of the Pepper & Carrot AI flipbook series — the deploy itself. Post 14 provisioned the five backing services and built the container; this post turns that container into a public URL. The FastAPI backend ships to Fly.io behind a scale-to-zero machine, the React frontend ships to Cloudflare Pages with a single build-time env var, and a layer-by-layer verification walkthrough confirms Modal, Neon, R2, Fly, and Pages all talk to each other end to end. The honest part is the cold start — the first answer after idle takes 15–30 seconds, the price the architecture pays for $0 idle — and this post is honest about where that cost sits and how a fire-and-forget warmup would hide it.