I’m trying to create a website where the user enters a few numbers, these numbers are fed into some equations, and the output of these equations is emailed to the user. I’m using Python 2.7 for everything. I’m using a cheap Amazon instance (m1.small, Ubuntu 12.04) to host the frontend, but I only want to launch a backend instance when needed (the computations are heavy and require a powerful – and expensive – instance). I can use boto to programmatically launch a backend instance, but after that how do I feed the user input into the backend? Everything is simple enough when I’m doing things manually, with SFTP and SSH, but what’s the programmatic way to do it? Should I simply execute SFTP and SSH from my Python script (using, say, ‘os.system’)? Somehow that feels wrong; how do people actually do it?

I’m trying to create a website where the user enters a few numbers, these numbers are fed into some equations, and the output of these equations is emailed to the user. I’m using Python 2.7 for everything. I’m using a cheap Amazon instance (m1.small, Ubuntu 12.04) to host the frontend, but I only want to launch a backend instance when needed (the computations are heavy and require a powerful – and expensive – instance). I can use boto to programmatically launch a backend instance, but after that how do I feed the user input into the backend? Everything is simple enough when I’m doing things manually, with SFTP and SSH, but what’s the programmatic way to do it? Should I simply execute SFTP and SSH from my Python script (using, say, ‘os.system’)? Somehow that feels wrong; how do people actually do it?

I’m trying to create a website where the user enters a few numbers, these numbers are fed into some equations, and the output of these equations is emailed to the user. I’m using Python 2.7 for everything. I’m using a cheap Amazon instance (m1.small, Ubuntu 12.04) to host the frontend, but I only want to launch a backend instance when needed (the computations are heavy and require a powerful – and expensive – instance). I can use boto to programmatically launch a backend instance, but after that how do I feed the user input into the backend? Everything is simple enough when I’m doing things manually, with SFTP and SSH, but what’s the programmatic way to do it? Should I simply execute SFTP and SSH from my Python script (using, say, ‘os.system’)? Somehow that feels wrong; how do people actually do it?

I’m trying to create a website where the user enters a few numbers, these numbers are fed into some equations, and the output of these equations is emailed to the user. I’m using Python 2.7 for everything. I’m using a cheap Amazon instance (m1.small, Ubuntu 12.04) to host the frontend, but I only want to launch a backend instance when needed (the computations are heavy and require a powerful – and expensive – instance). I can use boto to programmatically launch a backend instance, but after that how do I feed the user input into the backend? Everything is simple enough when I’m doing things manually, with SFTP and SSH, but what’s the programmatic way to do it? Should I simply execute SFTP and SSH from my Python script (using, say, ‘os.system’)? Somehow that feels wrong; how do people actually do it?

I’m trying to create a website where the user enters a few numbers, these numbers are fed into some equations, and the output of these equations is emailed to the user. I’m using Python 2.7 for everything. I’m using a cheap Amazon instance (m1.small, Ubuntu 12.04) to host the frontend, but I only want to launch a backend instance when needed (the computations are heavy and require a powerful – and expensive – instance). I can use boto to programmatically launch a backend instance, but after that how do I feed the user input into the backend? Everything is simple enough when I’m doing things manually, with SFTP and SSH, but what’s the programmatic way to do it? Should I simply execute SFTP and SSH from my Python script (using, say, ‘os.system’)? Somehow that feels wrong; how do people actually do it?