Django Deployment Revisited
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The last time we had a discussion about deployment was the Django Deployment Bonanza in January of 2011, and it was one of the most well-attended meetups. This suggests that deployment is a hot topic, or at least one that many find painful. A lot has changed in 1.5 years and we now have a plethora of deployment options for our Django projects.
I'll walkthrough the popular commercial PaaS offerings such as Heroku (http://heroku.com) and Dotcloud (http://dotcloud.com) as well as open source offerings such as Redhat's OpenShift (http://openshift.redhat.com) and VMWare's CloudFoundry (http://cloudfoundry.com).
I'll also give a sneak preview of Appsembler (http://appsembler.com), our cloud application platform built on Stackato (http://activestate.com/stackato), another commercial PaaS solution. Appsembler provides SaaS-as-a-service, meaning that we make it easy to offer your Django application as a hosted service including the billing of your customers.
If there's time we can also discuss using Fabric (http://fabfile.org) and Boto (http://docs.pythonboto.org/) as well as Chef (http://www.opscode.com/chef/) to deploy to IaaS providers such as Amazon or Rackspace. This way is not as sexy as using a PaaS, but for ultimate control and flexibility, one often needs to have full access to a server.
For background info on PaaS solutions for Django, check out this blog post that I wrote: