Docker + Django on Elastic Beanstalk

Question

I have a Django project. I am considering adding Docker to it before deploying to Elastic Beanstalk. I am very new to Django and Docker and want to know what are the benefits of using Docker when deploying a Django app to Elastic Beanstalk. Thanks!

Answer 1

The general benefits of using Docker in EB, as compared to regular Python EB environment portability and reproducibility .

If you bundle your django app as Docker container, you know that you your development environment will be exactly same as your production one. All the dependencies, package versions, tools will be same in the container, regardless if it runs on your local workstation, home laptop or on EB platform.

However, when you use regular Python platform, the portability and reproducibility can be difficult to guarantee. The current Python platform is based on Amazon Linux 2 . So the question is, is your development environment at home or work exactly same? Usually this is not the case, which often leads to issues in the vain of "It works on my local ubuntu workstation, but not on EB".

Also, one day you may decide to migrate your app out of EB or even AWS. It will be much easier to do that when using docker. This is because EB is a custom product from AWS, not available in other could providers with its own settings and requirements.

EB supports two types of docker-based environments:

• single-docker
• multi-docker

Depending on your requirements, you would have to use one of them. Each of them has its own use-cases, which I think are out of the scope to discuss for this question.