Django on AWS for chump change

Some cheap and definitely not employer approved ways to run Django on AWS infrastructure on a budget

With the power of AWS and the Cloud Development Framework (CDK) we can spin up cheap infrastructure to host Django on. By leveraging cheap and free tier AWS services while also creating some very questionable resources and code we can scale a Django application down to a user base of 2 or less!

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Ultimately this talk will end up with a couple of code examples on how to use the AWS lambda web adaptor to deploy a Django app. On the way to this outcome we'll explore how to reduce costs on ECS and reveal some horrible python libraries I wrote to facilitate the outcome of a very cheap Django deployment.

Some examples include:

- using an aws lambda as a makeshift DNS resolver
- using ECS and EFS as a makeshift database storage (both postgres and sqlite)
- using S3 as a makeshift sqlite database storage layer

This talk has it's genesis in Heroku shutting down it's free tier and that spurring me on to dive a bit deeper into AWS and it's suite of services. I have a personal app that my family use and I didn't really feel like paying for some of AWS's services that end up being more expensive than I'd like for an app that scales to a total of 2 people.

I know there are people that use a raw EC2 for this kind of thing but I really wanted to get a few things out of this exploration:

1. Containerise the application and run it using an AWS service built for that purpose.
2. Define everything as infrastructure as code. I didn't want to manually manage any linux boxes. Anything that could be stateless should be.
3. Scale to pretty much zero if possible.

Speaker: Luke Wiwatowski

Luke is a senior software engineer at WSP. He's worked in the industry for 7 years and has spent more time than we would like to admit debugging Django and Python code. Luke also a long time ago was an Australian representative gymnast, competing at the Commonwealth Games and World Championships.

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Pizza and drinks provided by our sponsors: Xero, Reposit Power, ANU