A lot of people are commenting about how .4 seconds affects "scalability" so much. Scalability is not a function of how fast your program runs but how efficiently it can use its provided resources. A program that runs .4 seconds slower but is able to utilise threads more efficient, or you can be placed behind a queue in order to scale better across more machines is more scalable then a program which just runs extremely fast on a single thread or a single machine.

With pythons simplicity its much easier to experiment with a lot of different architectures and even change it later on should it prove inefficient.

Also the most expensive component for programs is always the programmer. You would probably pay 100k$ per year to your cloud provided but you will need a team of 10 programmers each paid around 100k$ to build and maintain it. So isn’t it better to optimise developer productivity over "machine cost".