Python at Heroku

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The final session of the day at the 2015 Python Language Summit was from Jacob Kaplan-Moss, who is a core contributor to the Django web framework and the director of security at cloud-application hosting service Heroku. He presented some numbers on how Python fits into the Heroku ecosystem, though he asked that attendees not share the numbers themselves. However, a general idea of Python's place at the company can be extracted from his talk.

Ruby is the most popular language used on Heroku, which is not a surprise since the other languages have only been supported on the platform for two years or so. JavaScript using Node.js is the second most popular, with Python in third place. Node.js is roughly half as popular as Ruby with "active developers", while Python has a quarter of the popularity of Ruby. PHP is next after Python; Java and Scala make up a fairly small portion of the languages used by Heroku's active developers.

A graph of the change in relative popularity (as compared to Ruby) showed Node.js "exploding", while Python is experiencing steady growth in popularity. Python is the second fastest growing language at Heroku after Node.js.

The list of most popular add-ons (packages that Heroku offers its Python developers) was not terribly surprising. The list reads something like a "who's who" of internet products and technologies: New Relic, logging, Redis, email, Memcached, MongoDB, and so on. He noted that Heroku users always get PostgreSQL, so it does not appear in the list.

Python 2.7 totally dominates the Python versions being used by Python applications in the last year, though it should be noted that it is the default version. Python 3.4 is next, but is smaller than 2.7 by a factor of ten. All other Python versions are less than one percent and the numbers for PyPy are "abysmal", which he found surprising. If you look at the numbers from just the last month, though, Python 3.4 has made some significant progress against 2.7. Part of that may be because the Django tutorial now uses Python 3 by default, he said.

In terms of Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) servers, Gunicorn completely dominates, while only Waitress has anything more than a small fraction of use by active Python applications. In terms of Python web frameworks, a bit less than two-thirds of active applications use Django and roughly one-third use Flask. That obviously doesn't leave much room for alternatives, with Tornado taking up the bulk of what's left.

It is important to note that these numbers are not general Python usage numbers, he said. The numbers come from "Python users doing web things", which definitely skews the results.