Ask HN: Transitioning from a single EC2 instance to something more resiliant?

#1

Post by type4 » Wed, Feb 01, 2023, 7:04 PM UTC

My situation is that I have a Django application that gets a decent amount of traffic, a growing amount. There's some backend stuff that happens on requests in addition to hitting the DB. Postgres/Django/Redis/a bunch of cron jobs are all on one instance and I think it's time to split things off to a more resilient architecture, I'd be screwed if for some reason this thing explodes.

It's overwhelming with all the different services and methodologies available, was wondering what people here think the 'best' way to approach this would be.

Re: Ask HN: Transitioning from a single EC2 instance to something more resiliant?

#2

Post by drost » Wed, Feb 01, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

I'm sure there are a number of ways to do this but here's how I would approach it.

1. Move Postgres to either it's own instance or use RDS

2. Move Redis to either it's own instance or use Elasticache

3. Convert your cron jobs to Lambda functions that run on cron timer

4. Move your EC2 instance behind a load balancer and create an autoscaling group

Re: Ask HN: Transitioning from a single EC2 instance to something more resiliant?

#3

Post by rlawson » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

drost wrote: post #2

I'm sure there are a number of ways to do this but here's how I would approach it. 1. Move Postgres to either it's own instance or use RDS 2. Move Redis to either it's own instance or use Elasticache 3. Convert your cron jobs to Lambda functions that run on cron timer 4. Move your EC2 instance behind a load balancer and create an autoscaling group

Yep this is good strategy for AWS. I has a Django system with 10k users with this exact setup that ran for 3 years before being superceded.

I second using a managed db even if not on AWS. Also dump your static stuff behind CloudFront or another CDN.

Also consider running in Fargate as once you get past the setup part it does make scaling easier