title: How to setup a scalable environment for the MEAN stack on AWS?
body: <p>I'm developing a web app on the MEAN stack (and probably other stuff, like some way of storing images).</p>
  
  <p>In the startup accelerator I'm working in I've been suggested to let go the IAAS approach for a PAAS one (namely AWS). I must admit being used to working on small scale apps on single virtual machines I'm very confused about how to approach the task and the whole PAAS thing.</p>
  
  <p>Reading through AWS documentation looks like Elastic Beanstalk is the way to go for building a scalable web app. From my understanding it abstracts away the infrastructure management workload taking care of load balancing and resource scaling.</p>
  
  <p>I decided to give it a try.</p>
  
  <p>Now I'm a bit confused on how to setup the infrastructure. Particularly I'm wondering how to fit MongoDB it the puzzle.</p>
  
  <p>I guess I shouldn't install it on the node.js machine but on a different one, so that the two can scale out depending on needs.</p>
  
  <p>My questions are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>where and how should I install Mongo?</li>
  <li>should I let go MongoDB in favour of something like DynamoDB? in this case how can I set up a local development environment?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Any suggestions would be appreciated.</p>