Starlette ASGI

Starlette is a lightweight ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) framework for Python, designed for building high-performance web applications. Unlike Flask (synchronous), Starlette is async-first: it uses Python's asyncio to handle thousands of concurrent connections efficiently. It provides routing, middleware, request/response handling, and WebSocket support. Starlette is the foundation for FastAPI (which adds validation and auto-docs). Teams use it for real-time APIs, microservices, and high-concurrency backends where resource efficiency matters. Starlette represents the modern Python web stack. It's lightweight (no batteries included) and performant (async-native). For teams that need high concurrency without the overhead of traditional frameworks, Starlette is ideal. It's also the foundation for FastAPI, which is one of the fastest-growing frameworks. Learning Starlette teaches async patterns in Python, a skill that transfers to other domains. Salaries are competitive ($140-200k USD senior) and growing as async adoption accelerates.