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Ask HN: Should I Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk for a Django Application?

by twillin on 8/25/17, 11:50 PM with 2 comments

I'm building an app with django, and am trying to decide whether or not to use Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, with the alternative being just an EC2 instance. The app will contain PHI, but that shouldn't affect the use of Elastic Beanstalk. What are your thoughts? Do you see any clear advantages to one over the other?

Thanks!

  • by binarynate on 8/26/17, 12:22 AM

    I use Elastic Beanstalk for my projects, and I really like it because makes deploying code much simpler and easier than managing my own EC2 instances. This is especially handy for rapid prototyping, when you want to get something out quickly in order to test a product idea. When I want to deploy a new version of my code, I just run a script to compress the app into a zip file, and then give that to Beanstalk to deploy. I use Node.js instead of Django, but I expect that the workflow is the same.

    You choose to run your Beanstalk app in one of these modes: - route all traffic to a single instance without a load balancer (the cheap option) - auto-scale instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer (the scalable option)

    One of the things I like about Beanstalk is that switching between these two modes is quick and easy. So, you can initially go with the cheap option to save money and then switch to the auto-scaling mode once you need it.

    If you're developing APIs, I also recommend considering Lambda. I plan to use Lambda + API Gateway for my next project, since you only pay for the usage of when your lambda functions are executed (as opposed to paying for your EC2 instances to be up all the time, even when they're not used), and they can scale more quickly than spinning up new EC2 instances.