Talk Python in Production

https://talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production

by mikeckennedy • 10 months ago

120 104 10 months ago

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

The idea of the book is to pull away a lot of the hype of big cloud providers, show practical steps how we run things over at Talk Python (podcast, courses, e-commerce, and more).I hope some of you find this refreshing!

You can read the first 1/3 online for free. The rest is available DRM free.

Kumzy• 10 months ago

Seems interesting, read the online summary. I am curious to read about your part on Chapter 14 (I am part of Litestar maintainer). Thank you for the book anyway !

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

Very cool Kumzy. Litestar is awesome, I interviewed some of the folks (you?) on the podcast. I give it some good press in that chapter.

hshdhdhehd2• 10 months ago

Amazing what a Hetzner dedi and docker compose can do

randomtoast• 10 months ago

I recently compared AWS and Hetzner, not only in terms of raw compute costs but also by factoring in the personnel costs required for operation. I found this perspective particularly interesting: https://beuke.org/hetzner-aws/

fastasucan4• 10 months ago

Something is wrong with the js/css on the site - for everyone with dark mode the <strong> text is grey against white background - super hard to read.

sionisrecur• 10 months ago

The dark mode still has a white background so there's no reason to have it.

bakugo2• 10 months ago

How much of the book is AI generated? Please be honest.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

Zero percent of the text is AI generated. The image, yes, but I spent 9 months writing this book personally.

divbzero2• 10 months ago

You noted using persistent volumes for storing data, e.g.:

  docker volume create umami-volume

How do you manage data backup and restore?

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

Hey, you just run whatever backup command you would regularly do via compose.

For example, if you run `sqldump --db umami ...` in regular postgres (which is what they are using IIRC), then you run:

docker exec umami "sqldump --db umami ..."

Or something almost exactly like this (just from memory here and I wrote that script a year ago).

VBprogrammer• 10 months ago

"Have you heard the phrase "You're not Google, you're not Facebook, and you're not Netflix"? The TL;DR; is those tech giants that have 1M+ concurrent users. They have a hard requirement for no downtime."

Actually, one of the more interesting parts of the Google SRE book was that they don't try to aim for 0 downtime. They consider the background error rate of any network request and optimising much beyond this is counter productive.

Even for individual services they make a point of not trying to make them perfectly available, as this means downstream services are less likely to build in adequate provision for failure.

hshdhdhehd2• 10 months ago

Choose how many nines you want. For most 99.9% availability is probably OK.

1dom• 10 months ago

I agree with this.

Those tech giants got to where they are by recognising specifically that they don't have "no downtime" requirements.

"Move fast and break things" isn't the mantra of companies with zero downtime requirements.

kinix3• 10 months ago

Unrelated to the content: why on earth is super-light grey a good "bold" colour for a white background? I'm having to highlight each of the bolded parts of the text just to understand it :/

edit: console command for anyone else struggling to read this `document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--bulma-strong-color', '#000');`

azangru• 10 months ago

Haha, came here to mention the light grey text on white background as well. This is a great example of poor accessibility. It should be obvious to a human eye that this is bad; but in case it weren't, one could open up Chrome dev tools, find the styles for this text, click on the color picker, and observe that Chrome reports the contrast ratio for that text to be 1.17, whereas a comfortable (accessible) contrast ratio starts at 4.5.

perch56• 10 months ago

Loads as a regular webpage for me (Safari, black font, white background).

kinix3• 10 months ago

The main text is black yes, but anything that's bold is light grey as per the CSS, which is near unreadable (even if you're not as colourblind as me I suspect)

JimDabell• 10 months ago

It only happens if you are using dark mode. That seems to be the only difference between light and dark mode on that site.

Elfener2• 10 months ago

Is this some new trend where websites include @media (prefers-color-scheme: light) and @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) in their css, but it just breaks the site?

This site doesn't even have two themes, that css is just there to break the bold text!

aitchnyu2• 10 months ago

Is there a catch in "It's 6x cheaper than DO and a whopping 20x cheaper than Azure" or are most companies I know getting ripped off?

brap• 10 months ago

Depends on which $$s go into that comparison. Server costs? Probably. Engineering time? Accounting for all kinds of risks? Unlikely.

rcxdude4• 10 months ago

I don't think I've seen a cloud-first company that spent less engineering time on managing their infrastructure. You just replace one set of work with another.

rcxdude4• 10 months ago

A lot are getting ripped off. To what degree depends on their tech capabilities and business savvy (i.e. what would it cost them to do it themselves and what kind of discount can they negotiate from the cloud provider. If you're paying the listed rates you are getting ripped of).

aitchnyu2• 10 months ago

At which monthly spend should we negotiate with AWS for example? And will they check if we are using 25 of their services instead of easily migratable VM-hosted apps?

MyOutfitIsVague4• 10 months ago

Those numbers bother me. What does it mean to be "6x cheaper"? Is that a sixth the price? If something costs $100, what is 6x cheaper than it? 2x cheaper? 1x cheaper?

It is as frustrating as when people use "200% faster" to mean exactly the same thing as "twice as fast", and "100% faster" to mean the same thing.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

See my comment above. In the book, I "show my work" on the math.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

Yes, they are being ripped off.

A 8 CPU / 16 GB Ram server at Hetzner is $30 or so per month. It's $200+ at AWS / Azure.

Bandwidth is 4TB included from free at Hetzner, it's $92.16 / TB or $368.64 additional at AWS / Azure.

That is where the 6x comes from. It's described in detail with that math in the book BTW.

maeln2• 10 months ago

Didn't yet go through the content, but having a AI generated image that you didn't even bother to at least touch-up a bit to fix the text does not give me a lot of confidence about the effort that went into this.

ayhanfuat• 10 months ago

I’m an occasional listener of the Talk Python podcast, and I’ve also taken Michael’s pytest course. It’s clear that he puts considerable effort into his content.

seanthemon2• 10 months ago

but clearly he lapsed here and as a non-listener I immediately clicked out.

maeln2• 10 months ago

In which case it is very infuriating and sad. Honestly if he just did not put that AI art on every page, the whole thing would look way more serious. Presentation and first impression sadly do matter. Put a pile of trash in a museum and people will think it's art, put art next to a pile of garbage and people will think it's trash.

_joel7• 10 months ago

Just not enough to actually record a podcast, but generate a script and send it to an API to generate a (very recognisable) AI voiced podcast. It's literally called "Talk Python" with no humans talking.

benrutter5• 10 months ago

I agree with everyone! Michael's name is a big stamp of "this will be high quality" for me, but if I didn't previously know that and saw an AI generated cover, there's a good chance I'd assume the content inside was AI generated slop, and might tune out without looking any further.

DannyPage• 10 months ago

But there was no care in the images, which made me skeptical of the content. The free chapters are also poorly written. It reads like he dictated the content and didn't do a single review pass on it. The Docker Compose chapter especially is very light on details and doesn't explain how to use the various features and what tradeoffs or issues you may encounter. Like the AI images, the whole product feels rushed and haphazard and lacking in quality.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

Thanks Ayhanfuat. I appreciate the comment. Yes, the image is AI generated, but the book and the content is not. I spent 9 months writing it. Cheers.

ahoka• 10 months ago

Adds nothing, they could just picked a totally unrelated stock photo if they wanted to add something there. It just immediately halo effects the whole thing as something put together without effort. Stop doing this!

MadameBanaan• 10 months ago

I came to this comment section to say exactly that.

At my work (university research lab) the Ph.D. students have to publish their thesis as a book to defend their degree. They are free to make the image for the cover, which is a very nice touch ang give you artistic freedom in what was supposed to be one of the most important moments of your career (I went for a picture of the chip I designed during my research).

For the past 3 years or so all we have are generic AI generated sciency-looking figures at the cover and it is depressing.

thrance• 10 months ago

ngirx and granian are my favorite technologies to work with! Completely agree, this trend of putting a completely useless and ugly AI image on top of your page, I despise. You could have searched the web for an actual diagram, if you wanted one here. These images provided negative values to your articles.

degamad• 10 months ago

ngirx and granian are my favorite technologies to work with!

I had the same initial thought, but I was skimming the page and came across this line:

Then, see how to deploy a Flask+HTMX app via Granian, wire it into NGINX, and ensure automatic startups with systemd.

So I've just discovered that https://github.com/emmett-framework/granian exists...

mnx• 10 months ago

Yeah, immediately off-putting, even though I actually enjoy the podcast. Not for like "AI bad" reasons, it's just ugly. Micheal, if you are reading this - please fix, it should take 5 minutes.

Elfener2• 10 months ago

I don't even understand why they do that, surely putting even a low quality something together would make it much better, and with actual font rendering.

lenkite• 10 months ago

Isn't this overly critical ?. The content matters far more than the image and the chapters are good. I didn't even register the image - I think most folks today have eyes that auto-skip images after being pattern-trained to ignore ads.

rcxdude4• 10 months ago

With an image that is that poor quality, if it didn't matter then it would have been better not to include it.

PetitPrince• 10 months ago

"Don't judge a book by its cover" indeed (and litteraly in that case), but also "first impression matters".

In that case throwing a generated image without touch up shows the lack of care of the author for a work that's not as fleeting as a podcast. It's not that hard to type the correct words and/or a non wobbly font with Paint.NET / Photopea / Gimp / Affinity Photo / Photoshop / <your favorite pixel editor here>. It also shows an usage of AI without supervision which is kind of a red flag.

I used to listen to Michael Kennedy a lot when my day job was Python, and still occasionally do so this may get a pass, but it's still a bad signal in my books.

MyOutfitIsVague4• 10 months ago

The cover has a stack that says "ngirx", and it's all a smudgy mess.

"Don't judge a book by its cover" is for people who don't actually read books. You can't necessarily tell when a book is good based on its cover, but you can absolutely tell with a high certainty that a book with a lazy, crappy, low effort cover is probably going to have a similar level of care and attention put to the contents. It's easily at least a 95% hit rate. Is not overly critical to see something presented lazily and assume it will also be lazy inside, and in this kind of field, I'd also expect that if the cover is AI generated, most of the content could easily be as well.

_joel7• 10 months ago

AI voice on podcast too, no thanks.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

Hey Joel, please point to example of AI voices, especially sold as real, on the podcast.

arcanemachiner• 10 months ago

Are you telling me that you haven't integrated granian and ngirx into your workflow?!

csmantle2• 10 months ago

And you definitely don't want to miss "Web Arppss" running on "Limux"!

sonnig• 10 months ago

we've integrated granian into our stack at $WORK recently and couldn't be happier

numlock86• 10 months ago

I clicked on the link and was greeted by AI slop instantly. I checked the comments, saw this, am writing this and will probably not look at it ever again. Guess I am just not the target audience. I wish them that their AI slop strategy works out just for the sake of good vibes, though. If everyone does it it can't be bad, right? I'm the issue here, clearly.

wiseowise• 10 months ago

You don't use ngirx in production? Do you even web scale, bro?

barapa• 10 months ago

Chill dog

anaccount342• 10 months ago

Agree, it tells me a lot if you are not willing to spend a couple hundred dollars to get a simple cover.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

How many people who you hire for $100 will do this themselves without AI these days?

CraigJPerry2• 10 months ago

You can and probably should go thinner than this, with uv we effectively have a workflow comparable to deploying static binaries in other language stacks. You don't need the complexity of docker for this book's goal.

Was hoping the book would cover data persistence.

portly• 10 months ago

Could you please elaborate? Where do you run your apps?

rcxdude4• 10 months ago

Presumably just directly on whatever system they are using. If you have something that can be plopped on whatever linux distro and run reliably then you've already got what docker is supposed to give you.

CraigJPerry2• 10 months ago

Exactly as sibling comment says, e.g. let's pretend the popular httpx cli was my project to deploy and run on the server. With only uv installed, i can:

    uv tool run "httpx[cli] @ git+https://github.com/encode/httpx"

To be clear in this example i'm not pulling a package published on pypi, i'm running the HEAD of that git repo (i could do a branch or tag instead). I could use the "uvx" shortcut instead of "uv tool run". I could specify a specific python version (either one already installed on this OS or choose a dist which uv downloads for me).

This caches the deps in an isolated virtual env for me. It'll only download the deps in the first run.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

This go thin with uv is good advice for smaller projects. But as you grow with more aspects, it gets more problematic.

I ran code that way for years. But now we have 23 different services: web apps, APIs, and database servers, my code and other self-hosted services.

I would NOT run 23 projects/servers (3 versions of postgres) this way. Like so much, it depends. FWIW, the book goes into depth about these trade-offs.

csmantle2• 10 months ago

I don't know, but the "Read Online" button leads me to "https[://]talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production/#read-online", and that URL then tries to redirect to "https[://]talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production#read-online". (Notice how the last slash of the path is missing).

This forced my browser to reload the page, and it beats the entire purpose of anchoring and fragment-based navs.

fastasucan4• 10 months ago

Ironically what is styled as <strong> </strong> is very hard to read as its almost the same color as the background.

tha182HatR• 10 months ago

The book needs to remove the AI images. They are actively hurting the eyes with the wrong and weird perspective.

It is pretty light reading, name dropping a lot of software without going into details.

As always with Python: These books do not tell you the downsides, and the future of Python is uncertain because the governance has been taken over by a bunch of mediocre weirdos. Python core has always suffered from the problem that occasionally smart people implement something and then leave, but the majority of core devs are pretty dumb and they can now vote in their own after van Rossum left.

divbzero2• 10 months ago

Thanks for describing your experience with Granian. I have stuck with Gunicorn and Uvicorn so far but am now motivated to try the newer alternative.

mikeckennedy23• 10 months ago

Nice. I used uwsgi -> gunicorn -> gunicorn with uvworkers -> granian. Granian is great. While not crazy popular along, it's really based on Rust's Hyper, see https://crates.io/crates/hyper Hyper has 400M downloads so safe to say it's pretty battle tested.

I interviewed the creator of Granian on Talk Python BTW.

lunias• 10 months ago

I'm glad to see people recognizing that computers are quite fast and that they don't need massive cloud-scale solutions for simple problems. That being said, Python really shines as glue code and in small scripts where performance doesn't matter. You'll see considerable performance (and likely maintainability) gains by moving off of Python to almost any other language.

Talk Python in Production

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