Case Study: Multi-Region High-Availability Django Deployment on AWS

This project demonstrates a production-grade deployment of a Django web application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. To ensure business continuity and minimize downtime, the architecture was engineered for Multi-Region High-Availability (HA) using a Warm Standby strategy.

1. Project Overview

  • Primary Region: us-west-2 (Oregon)
  • Secondary Region: us-east-1 (N. Virginia)
  • Tech Stack: Python 3.11, Django, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, RDS (PostgreSQL), Route 53, Application Load Balancer (ALB).

5. Key Results

  • Verified Health: Achieved a "Green" health status on AWS Elastic Beanstalk for the primary environment.
  • High Availability: The architecture successfully eliminates single points of failure at the regional level.
  • Optimized Recovery: The Warm Standby approach provides a recovery window of mere minutes compared to hours for traditional backups.

Project Source

2. System Architecture & Design Patterns

The architecture prioritizes fault tolerance and global availability:

  • Traffic Management: Route 53 handles global DNS, utilizing health checks to trigger failover between the primary and secondary regions.
  • Compute Tier: Elastic Beanstalk manages Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) behind ALBs in each region, ensuring the application scales based on demand.
  • Data Tier: Amazon RDS with Cross-Region Replication (Async) ensures data is backed up in the secondary region for immediate recovery.
  • Resilience Strategy: A Warm Standby configuration was implemented. This maintains a live database and a minimum-scale compute environment in the secondary region to balance cost-efficiency with a fast Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

3. Implementation & Engineering Highlights

Infrastructure Configuration

  • Environment Parity: Used requirements.txt to lock dependencies, ensuring the Python 3.11 environment on AWS matched the local development setup.
  • Automated Configuration: Leveraged .ebextensions/django.config to automate the WSGI path setup and enforce security protocols, such as disabling IMDSv1 on EC2 instances.
  • Deployment Efficiency: Implemented .ebignore to exclude local virtual environments (.venv), reducing deployment package size and preventing permission-related upload errors.

Deployment Workflow

  • Initialize: Configured the application identity and region using eb init.
  • Provision: Used eb create to automate the creation of the load balancer, security groups, and auto-scaling components.
  • Iterate: Managed updates via eb deploy, allowing for zero-downtime application upgrades.

4. Problem Solving & Challenges

IAM Privilege Resolution

Diagnosed and resolved "Insufficient IAM privileges" warnings during environment creation by manually verifying the aws-elasticbeanstalk-ec2-role.

Network Isolation

Designed separate VPC CIDR ranges (10.0.0.0/16 vs 10.1.0.0/16) for each region to prevent IP conflicts and allow for future VPC peering or shared services.

Deployment Debugging

Solved app-deploy failures caused by chown errors through proper exclusion of local development artifacts in the .ebignore file.