Rust in Production

Rust adoption can be loud, like when companies such as Microsoft, Meta, and Google announce their use of Rust in high-profile projects. But there are countless smaller teams quietly using Rust to solve real-world problems, sometimes even without noticing. This episode tells one such story. Cian and his team at Cloudsmith have been adopting Rust in their Python monolith not because they wanted to rewrite everything in Rust, but because Rust extensions were simply best-in-class for the specific performance problems they were trying to solve in their Django application. As they had these initial successes, they gained more confidence in Rust and started using it in more and more areas of their codebase.

About Cloudsmith

Made with love in Belfast and trusted around the world. Cloudsmith is the fully-managed solution for controlling, securing, and distributing software artifacts. They analyze every package, container, and ML model in an organization's supply chain, allow blocking bad packages before they reach developers, and build an ironclad chain of custody.

About Cian Butler

Cian is a Service Reliability Engineer located in Dublin, Ireland. He has been working with Rust for 10 years and has a history of helping companies build reliable and efficient software. He has a BA in Computer Programming from Dublin City University.

Links From The Episode

Lee Skillen's blog - The blog of Lee Skillen, Cloudsmith's co-founder and CTO
Django - Python on Rails
Django Mixins - Great for scaling up, not great for long-term maintenance
SBOM - Software Bill of Materials
Microservice vs Monolith - Martin Fowler's canonical explanation
Jaeger - "Debugger" for microservices
PyO3 - Rust-to-Python and Python-to-Rust FFI crate
orjson - Pretty fast JSON handling in Python using Rust
drf-orjson-renderer - Simple orjson wrapper for Django REST Framework
Rust in Python cryptography - Parsing complex data formats is just safer in Rust!
jsonschema-py - jsonschema in Python with Rust, mentioned in the PyO3 docs
WSGI - Python's standard for HTTP server interfaces
uWSGI - A application server providing a WSGI interface
rustimport - Simply import Rust files as modules in Python, great for prototyping
granian - WSGI application server written in Rust with tokio and hyper
hyper - HTTP parsing and serialization library for Rust
HAProxy - Feature rich reverse proxy with good request queue support
nginx - Very common reverse proxy with very nice and readable config
locust - Fantastic load-test tool with configuration in Python
goose - Locust, but in Rust
Podman - Daemonless container engine
Docker - Container platform
buildx - Docker CLI plugin for extended build capabilities with BuildKit
OrbStack - Faster Docker for Desktop alternative
Rust in Production: curl with Daniel Stenberg - Talking about hyper's strictness being at odds with curl's permissive design
axum - Ergonomic and modular web framework for Rust
rocket - Web framework for Rust

Official Links

Cloudsmith Website
Cian Butler's Website
Cian's E-Mail

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In this episode, we speak with Danilo Krummrich, Linux kernel maintainer and Rust for Linux core team member, about the groundbreaking work of integrating Rust into the Linux kernel. Among other things, we talk about the Nova GPU driver, a Rust-based successor to Nouveau for NVIDIA graphics cards, and discuss the technical challenges and cultural shifts required for large-scale Rust adoption in the kernel as well as the future of the Rust4Linux project.