PEAK is the ``Python Enterprise Application Kit". If you develop ``enterprise" applications with Python, or indeed almost any sort of application with Python, PEAK may help you do it faster, easier, on a larger scale, and with fewer defects than ever before. The key is component-based development, on a reliable infrastructure.
PEAK is based on several years of hard-won experience developing and managing mission-critical Python enterprise applications. Its authors have had to use and administer for some time, virtually all of the technologies present in PEAK. Although nearly all of PEAK is being written ``from scratch", it was created to replace existing tools that we've enjoyed - or struggled with - over the years.
Our apps require 24x7 availability for thousands of employees worldwide. So anything we build has to be ``stone-axe reliable." We want debugging to be a simple and painless process, so we've designed PEAK to make applications ``easy to reason about". We use techniques like ``lazy immutability" to prevent unintended side-effects, and ``complain early and often" to ensure that broken code announces itself as broken before it causes bugs or data corruption to creep in. We've learned our reliability lessons from several previous generations of (mostly unpublished) application and component frameworks, and applied them to this new, best-of-breed framework.