But there are situations where you might need to access the `Request` object directly.

## Details about the `Request` object

As **FastAPI** is actually **Starlette** underneath, with a layer of several tools on top, you can use Starlette's <a href="https://www.starlette.io/requests/" class="external-link" target="_blank">`Request`</a> object directly when you need to.

* Certificates have a **lifetime**.
    * They **expire**.
    * And then they need to be **renewed**, **acquired again** from the third party.
* The encryption of the connection happens at the **TCP level**.
    * That's one layer **below HTTP**.
    * So, the **certificate and encryption** handling is done **before HTTP**.
* **TCP doesn't know about "domains"**. Only about IP addresses.

    * One Uvicorn **process manager** would listen on the **IP** and **port**, and it would start **multiple Uvicorn worker processes**.
* **Kubernetes** and other distributed **container systems**
    * Something in the **Kubernetes** layer would listen on the **IP** and **port**. The replication would be by having **multiple containers**, each with **one Uvicorn process** running.
* **Cloud services** that handle this for you

## Proxy with a stripped path prefix

Having a proxy with a stripped path prefix, in this case, means that you could declare a path at `/app` in your code, but then, you add a layer on top (the proxy) that would put your **FastAPI** application under a path like `/api/v1`.

In this case, the original path `/app` would actually be served at `/api/v1/app`.

# -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Specification
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

# Card size and layers
size: { width: 1200, height: 630 }
layers:

  # Background
  - background:
      image: *background_image
      color: *background_color

  # Logo
  - size: { width: 144, height: 144 }
    offset: { x: 992, y: 64 }

    title: Booking Appointments with Twilio, Notion, and FastAPI
  - author: Abhinav Tripathi - Microsoft Blogs
    link: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cosmosdb/azure-cosmos-db-python-and-fastapi/
    title: Write a Python data layer with Azure Cosmos DB and FastAPI
  - author: Donny Peeters
    author_link: https://github.com/Donnype
    link: https://bitestreams.com/blog/fastapi-sqlalchemy/
    title: 10 Tips for adding SQLAlchemy to FastAPI

* Designed around these standards, after a meticulous study. Instead of an afterthought layer on top.
* This also allows using automatic **client code generation** in many languages.

### Automatic docs

other tools **build** these container images **incrementally**, adding **one layer on top of the other**, starting from the top of the `Dockerfile` and adding any files created by each of the instructions of the `Dockerfile`.

Docker and similar tools also use an **internal cache** when building the image, if a file hasn't changed since the last time building the container image, then it will **re-use the same layer** created the last time, instead of copying the file again and creating a...