automate deployments in ec2

Question

I'm very new to Amazon Web Services, I was wondering if anybody had experience in deploying Django apps on EC2? I have my app running on EC2 right now, but if I had to deploy everything for multiple instances, it would take some time--time that I may not have as we continue to grow.

My question is, what do people normally do to automate deployment of the django apps? Are there (preferably free) tools available that we can configure?

Answer 1

You may also want to have a look at the open source tool Cloudify which automates the installation, configuration, monitoring and scaling of applications on EC2 (or any other cloud for that matter). You can use plain scripts or Chef cookbooks to install and configure your application.

Answer 2

Fabric is a really great tool for running commands on distributed groups of servers (I use it for provisioning and setup as well as running maintenance and deployment tasks); if you want to manage configuration, you might want to take a look at Puppet or Chef.