Google Cloud has donated $350,000 to the Python Software Foundation, with the goals of aiding CPython development, improving foundational Python tools, and beefing up the security of the Python package ecosystem.
Three specific projects will be supported by the donation, Google Cloud said on February 11. These include:
- Productionized malware detection for the PyPI (Python Package Index) repo of software for Python. Google Cloud uses the index to distribute hundreds of client libraries and developer tools, including the TensorFlow open source machine learning library.
- Improvements for foundational Python services and tools.
- A CPython developer-in-residence for this year, who will work full-time to help the CPython project prioritize maintenance and address a backlog. CPython is the reference implementation of the language.
Google Cloud also has recommitted an in-kind donation of Google Cloud infrastructure to the foundation. Also, the Google Cloud Public Datasets program now offers a new public dataset of PyPI download statistics and project metadata, which is updated in real-time. Google Cloud account holders can query these datasets with the BigQuery data warehouse or BigQuery Sandbox, which provide as much as 1TB of free data queries monthly.
Google Cloud said in a bulletin that Python was “critically important” to Google Cloud and customers, serving as a popular runtime for many hosted services, from the Google App Engine platform-as-a-service launched more than a decade ago to the more recent serverless products including Google Cloud Functions.
