What this Python deploy is

This course takes one Python web application from your laptop onto AWS. The application is a Django project. The shape is the same for any WSGI app: one process that speaks HTTP, a reverse proxy in front of it, and a database that is not on the laptop.

What you already have

The instance, the disk, and the Postgres database are the EC2 and RDS course. The network they sit in is the VPC course. This course does not rebuild either of those. It assumes an instance you can reach, and a database that instance is allowed to open on port 5432.

• Easy: one process on that instance. Gunicorn runs Django. Nginx sits in front of it. A script starts both when the machine boots.
• Medium: a name on the internet, HTTPS, the database URL, and the secret key. The database itself is not created again.
• Hard: more than one copy of the same process, on ECS, then behind a load balancer.

runserver is how you develop. It is one process, it serves static files for convenience, and it is not what you leave listening on port 80. The next lesson replaces it.