I believe this is a nuance with Python namespaces, not exactly distributed related. Calling a method/class on an instance such as instance.some_func(arg) means you are calling class.some_func(instance, arg). Since __dict__ is used to access instance attributes and module is a class then it will not show up. You can use dir() instead which accesses complete list of attributes. For your example you can try running print("module" in dir(ddp)) which will print out True.