In this chapter, you learned about the Factory design pattern and the context in which it's used. We understood the basics of the Factory, and how it is effectively used in software architecture.

We looked at Simple Factory, where an appropriate instance is created at runtime based on the type of the argument passed by the client.

We also discussed the Factory method pattern, which is a variation of Simple Factory. In this pattern, we defined an interface to create objects, but the creation of objects is deferred to the subclass.

We went on to explore the Abstract Factory method, which provides an interface to create families of related objects without specifying the concrete class.

We also worked out a real-world Python implementation for all the three patterns, and compared the Factory method with Abstract Factory method.

At the end of this chapter, we're now ready to take the next step and study other types of patterns, so stay tuned.