Why combine YOLOv8 and FastAPI? Object detection is at the heart of many modern applications—think smart cameras, inventory robots, or AR experiences. YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once) gives you state‑of‑the‑art accuracy while still running fast enough for real‑time use. FastAPI, on the other hand, is a lightweight, async‑first web framework that makes it trivial to expose a model as a REST endpoint. In this tutorial you’ll walk through: Preparing a small custom dataset and training a YOLOv8 model. Wrapping the model in a FastAPI service that accepts images and returns detections. Docker‑izing the whole stack so it can run anywhere with a single docker compose up . By the end you’ll have a reproducible, container‑based API that can serve predictions in a few milliseconds.…