I have a general question regarding how APIs are scaled. I have a basic RESTful API powered by Django rest framework, the backend uses RDS for database management. Right now, I'm deploying my django application to a digitalocean droplet but thinking of switching over to EC2 or potentially EKS. Is my understanding correct that I can effectively point my application to the RDS endpoint and spin up several EC2 instances with the same Django application fronted by an ELB? Would this take care of incoming traffic and the scalability of the django application?
This isn't exactly a coding question so I'm not sure if this is the best stackexchange site to ask this.
My two cents here:
I`ve been using lambda to serve Django and Flask apis for quite some time now, and it works great. You don't need to worry about scalability at all, unless there is a chance that your API would receive more than 10,000 requests per second (very unlikely on most scenarios). It will be way cheaper than EKS, even cheaper than EC2. I have a app with 400k active users which is served by an API running on lambda, I never paid more than $25 on invokations.
You can use Zappa (which is exclusively for python, I recommend) or Serverless framework, they will take care of most of the heavy work and make the deployment very easy.
But have in mind that lambda is not very good for long running tasks, like cronjobs. If you have have crons that might take some time to be executed your invokations can get a little expensive if you invoke it ofteen (lambdas can run up to 15 minutes, but those 15 minutes will be much more expensive than EC2). Also, the apigateway in front of the lambda function have a 30 seconds timeout, so your requests must be processed before that. If you think your requests will take longer, you will need to leverage some async requests. I think it is a very small price to have a full service without having to worry about the infrastructure.