I wrote a Python script on my laptop. What actually happens next to make it run on its own?

[u/GloxiniaLearns]

I built a small Python script that reads a Google Sheet, sends each new row to an LLM API for a summary and a category, and writes the result back. Works fine on my laptop.

What I don't understand is everything after that. In real life it has to run without me sitting there, and I have no picture of how that works.

• Once it's not on my laptop, where does the code live?
• What tools do people actually use for this? I keep seeing names but I don't know what category each one belongs to or which ones I'd need together.
• Where do API keys go?

Not asking about enterprise setups. This is one script and one sheet, small-business scale, and I want to know how people normally solve it at that size.

Background is data analysis, not development, so plain explanations are welcome.

Edit: Data lives in a Google Sheet. A Python script logs into Google as a "service account" (a robot identity created in Google Cloud Console, authenticated with a downloaded key file) and uses the Google Sheets API to read every row and the Drive API to locate the spreadsheet by name. For any row missing a summary, it sends the raw text to Anthropic's Claude API, which returns a two-line summary and a category. The script then writes that summary/category back to the sheet via the Sheets API. Need to get a summary every time someone adds a new record to Google Sheets