Why we're writing machine learning infrastructure in Go, not Python

At this point, it should be a surprise to no one that Python is the most popular language for machine learning projects. While languages like R, C, and Julia have their proponents--and use cases--Python remains the most universally embraced language, being used in every major machine learning framework. So, naturally, our codebase at Cortex--an open source platform for deploying machine learning models as APIs--is 87.5% Go. Machine learning algorithms, where Python shines, are just one component of a production machine learning system. Cortex is built to automate all of this infrastructure, along with other concerns like logging and cost optimizations. A user can have many different models deployed as distinct APIs, all managed in the same Cortex cluster.