Hpflsk has been playing around with Django and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. We’ve hit a few roadblocks along the way, but so far we’re up and running and everything seems to be fine.
Just to summarise our current situation:
- We have 1 Android and 3 iOs developers working hard on version 2 of the app
- These guys and me (sometimes) are the only people hitting the new API
- The new version of the app will be hitting the new AWS Elastic Beanstalk setup
Here are a few roadblocks and successes we hit along the way:
- Setup using this excellent guide from Grigory Kruglov but each of the .config files, change commands: from commands: to container_commands:. This cost be a few frustrating and headbangingly awful days
- The official docs get you started with a simple example, but in my opinion are really lacking
- The whole config system is wack. The options are spread across two seperate files and one of them seems to update from AWS at random times. Uhh, it sucks and leads to so many headaches.
One thing I wanted to talk about was cost. There’s a guide that is on the Amazon site which estimates costs at something ridiculous – in the $1000s of dollars – and way outside the range of a lean startup. You definitely want to monitor your expenses using a Cloudwatch alarm.
So far, Hpflsk has been charged around $50 AUD a month with only a grand total of 5 people hitting the API regularly. This includes the free tier. This may seem like not that much, but it definitely discourages developers from creating a bunch of apps and seeing what sticks – which seems to be the lean startup model. So if you want to keep everything super lean and mean, you’re better off with a VPS (~$100 AUD per year). It’s that not much of a pain in the ass to setup – took me around a day – and can be used to host multiple projects.
