Serverless Django with Zappa

By Neal Todd, at Djangocon Europe 2019, on Do 11 April 2019
Sketchnote of Serverless Django with Zappa

An exploration of how Serverless can be used to run your Django applications with the pros and cons of doing so. The focus is on AWS Lambda using Zappa for deployment.

Over the last couple of years, Serverless has become an increasingly popular option for serving applications, going beyond even containerisation in its promise of minimal DevOps overheads and reduced operational costs - unburdening developers to focus on the applications themselves.

Often serverless is used in conjunction with microservices as part of a larger application stack. But how effective is it for running your entire Django application as an alternative to the traditional ‘always-on’ model for a website? This talk explores the pros and cons of running your own personal/experimental Django projects and the challenges of using it in a full production environment.

We’ll be exploring this with a concrete example based on AWS Lambda and associated services, Zappa for deployment and Wagtail as the Django application to give a Serverless Content Mangement System.

The talk is accompanied by online documentation so that attendees can run their own Serverless CMS or their own application with little or no running costs.