AWS Elastic Beanstalk - Using Mongodb instead of RDS using Python and Django environment

Question

I've been following the official Amazon documentation on deplaying to the Elastic Bean Stalk.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create_deploy_Python.html

and the customization environment

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/customize-containers.html#customize-containers-format

however, I am stuck. I do not want to use the built in RDS database I want to use mongodb but have my django/python application scale as a RESTful frontend or rather API endpoint for my users.

Currently I am running one EC2 instance to test out my django application.

Some problems that I have with the Elastic Bean: 1. I cannot figure out how to run commands such as

pip install git+https://github.com/django-nonrel/django@nonrel-1.5

1. Since I cannot install the device mongo driver for use by django I cannot run my mongodb commands.

I was wondering if I am just skipping over some concepts or just not understanding how deploying on the beanstalk works. I can see that beanstalk just launches EC2 instances and possibly need to write custom scripts or something I don't know.

I've searched around but I don't exactly know what to ask in regards to this. Top results of google are always Amazon documents which are less than helpful in customization outside of their RDS environment. I know that Django traditionally uses RDS environments but again I don't want to use those as they are not flexible enough for the web application I am writing.

Answer 1

You can create a customize AMI to your specific needs the steps are outline in the AWS documentation below. Basically you would create a custom AMI with the packages needed to host your application and then update the Beanstalk config to use your customize AMI.

Using Custom AMIs