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

From the time Python has come into existence, its popularity has started rising since then and reached to 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 different 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, 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 that is Spotify, then 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 amongst top Python users. Overall backend communication takes place with the use of ZeroMQ, an open networking framework written in Python and in 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 upon 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, now let’s move on to another Python case study that is Quora. It is a social network platform of question and answer. There was a lot of consideration before choosing Python amongst C#, Java, and Python. Lack of type checking and relative slow behavior was drawing back the interest from python. They also had reasons for not choosing other languages. They didn’t go with C# because of it’s 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 older in the market so there were doubts about its future growths. So the founders of Quora got inspired by Google and choose 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 of 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 process alerts, suppressing the duplicate ones and then route them to people that need to see them. This app has proven to 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 ensure 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 developer’s 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 Py3 written projects of Python that were published by Facebook including Facebook Ads API and a Python async IRC bot framework.
Facebook, upgrading their 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. There decision – “Python where we can, C++ where we must” stated that python will be implemented for enabling ease of maintenance and relatively fast 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.”

Summary

Python initially was used as a language for drafts as it was simple and cheap. But as we know that “simple is reliable” and so is python. Many companies learned it later and a lot harder way that more parts a mechanism has more mess it creates. That is why they choose python and now it covers most of the world’s popular apps built-in mechanisms. It is proved 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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