[Django]-Getting started with Django on Amazon Web Services

There is nothing “special” with EC2 here. It just provides bare (or generally preconfigured from custom AMI) system instance – you have access to whole virtualized system, so you can safely break things on your own. Think about it as a specific VPS.

You have to prepare deployment by yourself, which is not so difficult – just follow the documentation. I’d advice to run with basic linux distro and add needed stuff than to rely on some preconfigured image. As for you questions:

1. You need to do two things: setup your instance (accounts, needed software, other custom setup, so some linux administration guide should be handy) and prepare django app deployment (deploy python code, hook up to web server). For the latter, general deployment instructions for django can be applied here ( http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/ ).

2. Start with AMI with your favorite linux distro, and then add necessary software from it’s repository.

3. Mount and use EBS as soon as possible for all your data. When rebooted, EC2 instance will wipe out all it’s data, so be prepared for this. Do system snapshots to AMI to have quick recovery on failure.

Yes, you can deploy several applications on one instance, but mind that EC2 instance is virtualized (with quite high “virtualization tax” imo, especially for smaller instances), so you might run into general performance problems. Assume that you’d need migrate to bigger instance/multiple instances after some time.

Virtualenv should be your default deployment tool. Yes, you can use it here too.