A couple friends and I just spent the past 48 hours building an app that recreates a lot of this functionality. Some key things to note with this is that you're stuck with RDS, and locked in to amazons platform choice.
Can't you use RDS like any MySQL database? And since you're writing a standard WSGI app, it seems like there is very little lock-in. This seems to basically automate the provisioning of EC2 instances for the web app and the DB. and since you just have a standard app, you're free to move it around as needed.
Or is there something that I'm missing with the Elastic Beanstalk? (I've only used raw EC2)
Yes RDS is like any MySQL db. The key word there being MySQL. If you want to use another data store like say, postgres or even some NoSQL solution. You're outta luck.
As for platform lock-in, my comments were less towards the web services level and more about system level concerns. It's not entirely clear how you would run persistent background tasks (read: celery). This doesn't even get into the headaches of learning yet another DSL to define OS packaging requirements.
That being said, IMO this would be great for simple apps, with no strenuous requirements. In addition, anything that allows more people to easily deploy their django apps is a good thing.
Yes, RDS works with MySQL. And you're right about the provisioning for the EC2 instances for beanstalk, but it doesn't do much for RDS, that needs to be set up independently.
If anyone is interested in the work we did this weekend, https://github.com/jawnb/badatcomputers