The article introduces DFAST, a flexible prokaryotic genome annotation pipeline designed to facilitate the submission of annotated genomes to public sequence databases. DFAST, initially an online annotation server, has processed over 7000 jobs since its launch in 2016. The authors present a new background annotation engine, DFAST-core, which can annotate a typical bacterial genome within 10 minutes, providing rich information such as pseudogenes, translation exceptions, and orthologous gene assignments. The modular framework of DFAST allows for easy customization and future extensions. The software is implemented in Python 3 and is available under the GPLv3 license, both as a standalone program and an online version. The article also includes a detailed workflow description, results, and comparisons with other annotation tools, highlighting DFAST's speed and accuracy, especially for well-characterized organisms.The article introduces DFAST, a flexible prokaryotic genome annotation pipeline designed to facilitate the submission of annotated genomes to public sequence databases. DFAST, initially an online annotation server, has processed over 7000 jobs since its launch in 2016. The authors present a new background annotation engine, DFAST-core, which can annotate a typical bacterial genome within 10 minutes, providing rich information such as pseudogenes, translation exceptions, and orthologous gene assignments. The modular framework of DFAST allows for easy customization and future extensions. The software is implemented in Python 3 and is available under the GPLv3 license, both as a standalone program and an online version. The article also includes a detailed workflow description, results, and comparisons with other annotation tools, highlighting DFAST's speed and accuracy, especially for well-characterized organisms.