Final Thoughts¶
Now is a good time to revisit that old “Django doesn’t scale” myth. What do you think? If you remember in the introduction we said it is either completely true or patently false depending on your perspective.
It’s true that firing up a site with manage.py runserver and SQLite on a
small cloud server isn’t going to get you very far.
On the other hand, you’ve now seen the server stack we’ve used to build sites that handle millions of page views per day without breaking a sweat. It’s the same (or very similar) to the biggest Django sites online today. In fact, you now know more about building and deploying scalable, high performance Django sites than the founding members of Instagram when they started. Back in 2012 when they were a team of three supporting the Django infrastructure for 14+ million users, they had this to say on their engineering blog:
Our core principles when choosing a system are:
Keep it very simple
Don’t re-invent the wheel
Go with proven and solid technologies when you can1
We couldn’t agree more. So as you continue on your Django journey, don’t forget what got you here. Simplicity is the guiding philosophy.