Why is it recommended to avoid using Django's built-in server for production environments and what risks does it pose?

The built-in Django server (runserver) is intended only for development and testing, not for production environments. Reasons:

• It is single-threaded and not optimized for handling a large number of requests.
• It lacks support for scaling and load balancing.
• It has no built-in security mechanisms, such as DoS attack protection.
• It does not provide the stability and fault tolerance required in production.

The risk of using the built-in server in production includes potential crashes, low performance, and vulnerabilities that could lead to data loss or service unavailability.

In production, WSGI servers (like Gunicorn, uWSGI) behind a reverse proxy (like Nginx) are typically used, providing reliability, scalability, and security.