[eanzenberg]

>>I was also told that doing it the real way using Tensorflow would be the way to go and I agree with that sentiment if my problem was Google scale which it wasn't. In fact I would argue that most workloads around the world are not Google scale and neither are most Google workloads.

You can convert the Keras model to TF pretty easily if you need to, as long as you use the TF backend. I did this, and converted the string preprocessing in TF so the model could be used in TF serving taking only the string as input.