How to setup a scalable environment for the MEAN stack on AWS?

I'm developing a web app on the MEAN stack (and probably other stuff, like some way of storing images).

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.

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.

I decided to give it a try.

Now I'm a bit confused on how to setup the infrastructure. Particularly I'm wondering how to fit MongoDB it the puzzle.

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.

My questions are:

• where and how should I install Mongo?


• should I let go MongoDB in favour of something like DynamoDB? in this case how can I set up a local development environment?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.