Google, Facebook, Netflix, Quora – the Secret Ingredient – Python!

From the time Python came into existence, its popularity has been rising since then and has reached the tag of “most-popular programming language” now. Python was and still is the choice for most of the startups because of its low cost, simplicity, and various frameworks. On top of every other thing, it’s free, open-source, and has a mighty army of developers that have been formed over the years.

Giant companies like Instagram and Spotify use Python and appreciate its use in bulk by others, too! Let’s look at some Python Case Studies, or I can say entrepreneurial cases written and solved by Python.

Python Case Studies

Starting with the very first Python case study, which is Spotify, we will discuss other companies like Quora, Netflix, Google, and Facebook.

Spotify

One of the music streaming giant which is using Python as its sword primarily for data analysis and backend services. It is one of the major market players and among the top Python users. Overall backend communication takes place with the use of ZeroMQ, an open networking framework written in Python and C++.

The reason behind the choice of Python’s services is the fast development pipeline during coding. The suggestions and recommendations on Spotify largely depend on volumes of data analytics. Hence, as an interpreter for this stream of data, Spotify uses Luigi, a Python module that syncs with Hadoop. This is how Spotify also manages functions such as “Radio and Discovery”.

Python handles how libraries work together and cross-check errors quickly to allow troubleshooting and redeployment. Around 6000 individual processes work together now in Spotify over the nodes of the Hadoop cluster.

Quora

So, after knowing how Spotify works using Python, let’s move on to another Python case study, which is Quora. It is a social network platform for questions and answers. There was a lot of consideration before choosing Python amongst C#, Java, and Python. Lack of type checking and relatively slow behavior were drawing back the interest in Python. They also had reasons for not choosing other languages. They didn’t go with C# because of its proprietary Microsoft Language and didn’t want to put efforts to cope up with future updates to it.

For Java, its strict syntax was enough to get rejected. Also, Java was a little less established in the market, so there were doubts about its future growth. So the founders of Quora got inspired by Google and chose Python for its ease of writing and readability. They got rid of their initial problem of type checking by writing unit tests that accomplish the same thing.

Another reason for the choice was again the good framework support that Python provided, such as Django and Pylons. Having Python and JS together for handling user interactions was also a plus point.

Netflix

The use of Python by Netflix is very similar to that by Spotify. That is, they rely on Python for data analysis on the server-side. A significant increase in the number of users of Python in Netflix itself is because they allow their engineers to choose the language of code. They prefer the standard and third-party libraries and enjoy the extremely active community.

Also, Python is so easy to develop that the developers are left with no choice other than Python! The primary use of Python is in the Central Alert Gateway. This app processes alerts, suppressing the duplicate ones, and then routes them to people who need to see them. This app has proven to be a good addition to Netflix as it can give automated solutions to shaky problems such as terminating the process or rebooting.

Secondly, the Monkey app used to track down security and history issues has also proven to be a hit. It is also used to track dozens of SSL certificates related to Netflix’s domain.

DataFlair has published this Netflix Python Case Study in detail. Have a look – how Netflix uses Python

Facebook

This platform is an exceptional user of Python because of its developers’ extensive use of the language. This is so because of the Python libraries and framework reduce the “code-load,” and they can majorly focus on “actual” improvements. It is also noticed that the infrastructure of Facebook has become more scale-efficient.

According to a 2016 post by Facebook, “Python is currently responsible for multiple services in infrastructure management.”

There are various Python 3 projects that were published by Facebook, including Facebook Ads API and a Python async IRC bot framework.
Facebook is upgrading its infrastructure and handlers to 3.4 from 2, and guess who is helping their engineers in the process – AsyncIO!

Google

Above any company, Google has been a super supporter of Python, that too from the very beginning. Their decision – “Python where we can, C++ where we must” stated that Python will be implemented for enabling ease of maintenance and relatively faster delivery than C++.

Some scripts, which were originally written in Perl or Bash, were re-coded into Python. It is now the official Google server-side language. To top it all off, Peter Norvig said:

“Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today, dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we’re looking for more people with skills in this language.”

Instagram

Instagram migrated its massive photo-sharing backend from PHP to Django, a Python web framework, to scale for over a billion users. Engineers praised the clear syntax and vast library support, which cut feature rollout time. They used Celery, a Python task queue, to handle billions of likes and comments without lag.

Keywords such as Instagram, Python migration, and Django scalability stand out in tech blogs detailing this journey.

Dropbox

Dropbox chose Python for its desktop client, enabling fast iteration on sync logic that now handles exabytes of user files. The team created PyXL to blend HTML and Python for the web version, proving the language’s adaptability. Automatic code-formatters and static type hints keep large teams aligned.

Reasons to choose Python in Dropbox:

• It has fostered development and made learning easier.
• A single code that can be operated in any system.
• As Python focuses on clarity, it ensures that complicated problems are easily solved by the engineers.

Summary

Python was initially used as a language for drafts, as it was simple and cheap. But as we know, “simple is reliable,” and so is Python. Many companies learned it later and the hard way that the more parts a mechanism has, the more mess it creates. That is why they chose Python, and now it covers most of the world’s popular apps with built-in mechanisms. It is proven in black and white by Python that an amazing product can be backed up by simple and time-honored tools. As long as the users are satisfied with the performance, there is no loss!

Hope you liked these top Python case studies. I am sure you also want to share some more amazing Python case studies. Do share them with comments.

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