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Episode 254: Scaling Python Web Applications With Kubernetes and Karpenter

The Real Python Podcast

Jun 20, 2025 1h 4m devops tools web-dev
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Christopher Bailey
Christopher Bailey
Host
Calvin Hendryx-Parker
Calvin Hendryx-Parker
Guest

What goes into scaling a web application today? What are resources for learning and practicing DevOps skills? This week on the show, Calvin Hendryx-Parker is back to discuss the tools and infrastructure for autoscaling web applications with Kubernetes and Karpenter.

Episode Sponsor:

Calvin is the co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, a Python and AI consultancy. He shares how they recently helped a client scale a web application that employs video, audio, and chat sessions. We dig deep into the tooling behind modern Kubernetes systems management and performance monitoring.

Calvin shares a project bootstrap tool for streamlining the development and deployment of a web application. The tool includes a complete blueprint for the infrastructure needed to get started.

We also dig into a collection of coding tools Calvin has been experimenting with. We discuss his recent IndyPy presentation, “Battle of the Bots,” which put several AI code assistants through their paces.

This episode is sponsored by AMD.

Topics:

  • 00:00:00 – Introduction
  • 00:02:23 – Scaling a Django project using Kubernetes
  • 00:05:35 – Elastic Kubernets Service (EKS)
  • 00:09:10 – Kubernetes terminology and improvements in tooling
  • 00:11:29 – The Control Plane and the API
  • 00:14:06 – Video Course Spotlight
  • 00:15:11 – scaf: providing DevOps engineers a blueprint for new projects
  • 00:17:21 – What have been the benefits of scaf for internal teams?
  • 00:20:18 – How do you identify and reproduce scaling issues?
  • 00:22:44 – Dealing with IP address scaling
  • 00:26:03 – Why use other observability tools beyond AWS internal ones?
  • 00:29:22 – Other lessons learned and moving toward refactoring code
  • 00:33:53 – Scaling a voice-based LLM application
  • 00:35:35 – Sponsor: AMD
  • 00:36:11 – Looking at limitations and bottlenecks
  • 00:38:08 – Configuring a Kubernetes operator to act on itself
  • 00:39:47 – What project components are within a pod of containers?
  • 00:42:31 – Budgeting for scale using Karpenter
  • 00:43:58 – Tools for running containers locally
  • 00:46:01 – Are containers still a primary development tool for you?
  • 00:50:58 – Resources for learning DevOps and Kubernetes
  • 00:52:54 – Conferences and talks
  • 00:53:56 – Battle of the Bots: comparing coding agents
  • 00:55:15 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
  • 00:56:20 – What do you want to learn next?
  • 01:02:42 – What’s the best way for people to follow your work online?
  • 01:03:33 – Thanks and goodbye

Show Links:

Conferences and Meetups:

AI Coding Tools:

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