There is probably a nice document that will help me.  Please point to it.
If I write a Thrift server using Python what is the best way to deploy it in a production environment?  All I can find is examples of using the Python based servers that come with the distribution.  How can I use Apache as the server platform for example?  Will it support persistent connections?
Thanks in advance.
I assume that you are using the Python THttpServer? A couple of notes:
1) There is a comment in that code that reads
"""
This class is not very performant, but it is useful (for example) for
  acting as a mock version of an Apache-based PHP Thrift endpoint.
"""
I wouldn't recommend that you use it in production if you care about performance. If you read through this code a bit, you'll find that it is fairly easy to re-implement it using a different HTTP server of your choosing. There are a number of good options in the Python ecosystem.
2) Also if you read the code, you'll find that Thrift HTTP servers are regular old HTTP servers. They accept all traffic on a single path ('/' by default) and direct the message to the appropriate method by reading routing information encoded into the message itself (using the Thrift "processor" construct). You should be able to set up Apache/nginx/whatever in the normal way and simply forward all traffic to '/' on the host and port you are running on.
how to deploy a hardened Thrift server for python?