How AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon DynamoDB Simplifies Scaling

Here’s a use case we see among startups fairly frequently: You’re announcing a new product or service and your customers want to sign up to be notified when your Cool New Thing is available. This can lead to a period (perhaps just a few hours, but possibly longer) where your sign-up form is bombarded with many thousands (or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands!) of eager customers. You want the customer experience to be great; you know you’ll need to scale your site out to accommodate the surge, and you want to scale in when traffic tapers.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon DynamoDB are a great fit for this scenario because they make it simple to scale your application and database out and in with traffic. We’ve built a sample application to demonstrate this. The app was built with Python, Flask, and Bootstrap. It’s available on GitHub and includes a four-part video series to help you get started. The first video will have you running the app in Elastic Beanstalk in fewer than three minutes. The second video guides you through using the app, exploring its back-end components in the AWS Management Console. In the third video, we walk you through the finer points of the application’s architecture and configuration. We recently added a fourth video that introduces the AWS Elastic Beanstalk worker tier, an environment type for processing your app’s background tasks.

Part 1: Run the App

Part 2: Use the App

Part 3: Understand the App

Part 4: Worker Tier