Building a Large SaaS AI Product with Python - The Tale of Three Ecosystems

Explore the eight-year journey of building Rossum, an enterprise cloud-based AI software product that automates business transactions worth trillions of dollars using Python as the backend technology. Learn from real-world war stories, including surprising discoveries, regrettable decisions, and crucial successful choices made during the development process. Discover how three major Python ecosystems - traditional Python, Django, and the emerging Pydantic/FastAPI framework - were integrated into different components of the product, examining the decision-making process behind choosing multiple ecosystems and the implications of potential vendor lock-in. Gain insights into the practical challenges of scaling a large SaaS AI application and understand the trade-offs between different Python frameworks in enterprise environments. Consider the current state of Python's ecosystem fragmentation and its impact on the Zen of Python principle of having "one obvious way to do it," while exploring potential solutions for maintaining ecosystem cohesion in the face of evolving technologies and frameworks.