Python Go question in authentik

[dlukt]

I see a lot of the codebase is using python. But there's also some go.
I'm concerned about performance.
Python doesn't perform that well compared to Go.

When my Go REST/Graphql backend talks to authentik, which language is used on the authentik side?

[aayushdhote]

Authentik mostly uses python for its backend logic. Even if your Go backend talks to it, the main code running on the authentik side is python. Python may be slower than Go but it’s great for flexibility and features. If performance becomes a problem you could try caching or async calls to help speed things up. tech is like cooking bro speed matters but flavour (i mean features) wins heart.

[dlukt]

If you say so. For me performance is important, most important, especially with a component that's supposed to handle pretty much every authN task of all my services.
For local net, private facing stuff, sure, but otherwise, python is not the right choice for this type of essential component.
Thanks for the response though. :)

[aayushdhote]

Thanks for your response, I get that performance is super important especially for auth tasks. Python might not be the fastest, but I personally like how flexible and feature-rich it is. I guess every tech choice comes with trade-offs, and it’s interesting to hear different views on it.

[melizeche]

In my experience, once you introduce the network stack, language-level performance differences become negligible because the latency of I/O and network round-trips dominates execution time.
Nonetheless, Authentik uses Go in some components that require higher performance or benefit from the low-level control and concurrency features of a systems language.

Maybe you want to check this blog post, it's a good read on the subject 👍🏻
https://goauthentik.io/blog/2023-03-16-authentik-on-django-500-slower-to-run-but-200-faster-to-build/