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How do I deploy this app for my job: EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, something else entirely?

I'm tasked with creating a web app (I think?) for my job that will tracker something in our system. It'll be an internal tool that staff uses to keep track of the status of one of the things we do. It should look like trello, with cards that drag from step to step. That frontend exists, but my job is to make the system update when the cards are dragged. This requires using an API in Python and isn't that complicated to grab from/update. I have no idea how to put all of this together. My job is almost completely nontechnical and there's no one internally who knows what I'm doing except for me. I'm in so over my head here and have no idea where to begin. Is this something I should deploy on Elastic Beanstalk? EC2? How do I tie this together and put it somewhere?

Are you trying to pull in live data from Trello or from your companies own internal project management tool?
An EC2 might be useful, but honestly, it may be completely unnecessary if your company has its own servers. An EC2 is basically just a collection of rental computers to help with scaling. I have never used beanstalk so my input would be useless there.
From what I can assume from the question, you could have a python script running to pull from the API and make the changes without an EC2.

First thing you should do is gather as much information about what the end product should look like. From your question, I have the feeling that you have only a vague idea of what the stakeholders want. Don't be afraid to ask more clarification about an unclear task. It's better to spend 30 minutes discussing and taking note than to show the end-product after a month and realizing that's not what your boss/team wanted.
Question I would Ask
Who is going to be using this app? (technical or non-technical person)
For what purpose is this being developed?
Does it need to be on the web or can it be used locally?
How many users need to have access to this application?
Are we handling sensitive information with this application?
Will this need to be augmented with other functionality at some point?
This is just a sample of what I would ask, during the conversation with the stakeholder a lot more will pop up for sure.
What I think you have to do
You need to make a monitoring system for the tasks that need to be done by your development team (like a Kanban)
What I think you already have
A frontend with the card that are draggable to each bin. I also assume that you can create a new card and delete one in the frontend. The frontend is most likely written in React, Angular or Vue.js. You might also have no frontend framework (a mix of jQuery and vanilla js), but usually frontend developper end up picking a framework of sort to help the development.
A backend API in Python (in Flask or with Django-rest-framework most likely) that is communicating with a SQL database like postgresql or a Document database like MongoDB.
I'm making a lot of assumption here, but your aim should be to understand the technology you will be working with in order to check which hosting would work best. For instance, if the database that is setup is a MySQL database you might have some trouble with some hosting provider.
What I think you are missing
Currently the frontend and the backend don't communicate to each other. When you drag a card it won't persist if you refresh the page. Also, all of this is sitting in your computer and cannot be used by any one from your staff. You need to first connect the frontend with the backend so that the application has persistance. Then you need to deploy this application somewhere so that it is reachable by your staff.
What I would do is first work locally to make sure that the layer of persistance is working. This imply having the API server, the frontend server and the database server running simultaneously on your computer to develop. You should then fetch data from the API to know which cards are there in the database and then create them visually in your frontend at the right spot.
When you drop a card to a new spot after having dragging it should trigger a POST request to your API server in order to update the status of this particular card (look at the documentation of your API to check what you need to send).
The server should be sending back an updated version of the cards status if the POST request was sucessful, so your application should then just redraw the card at the right spot (it won't make a difference for you since they are already at the right spot and your frontend framework will most likely won't act on this change since the state hasn't changed). That's all I would do for that part.
I would then move to the deployment phase to make sure that whatever you did locally can still work online. I would use Heroku to start instead of jumping directly to AWS. Heroku is a service built on top of AWS which manage a lot of the complexity of AWS for you. This is great for prototyping and it means that when your stuff is ready you can migrate to AWS easily and be confident that a setup exist to make your app work. You might also be tied up to your company servers, which is another thing I would ask to the stakeholder (i.e. where can I put this application and where I can't put it).
The flow for a frontend + api + database application on Heroku is usually as follow. You create a github repo for your frontend (make it private) and you create an app on Heroku that will watch this repository for changes. It will re-deploy the application for you when it sees a change at a specific subdomain of Heroku hosting. You will need to configure some procfiles that will tell Heroku what to do with a given application type. This is where you need to double check what frontend you are using since that might change the procfiles used. It's most likely a node.js based frontend (React, Angular or Vue) so head over here for the documentation of how to put that online.
You will need to make a repo for the backend also that is separate from the frontend, these two entities are distinct and they only communicate through HTTP request (frontend->backend) and JSON (backend->frontend). You will need to follow the same idea as with the frontend to deploy, head over here.
Once you have these two online, you need to create a database on Heroku. This is done by adding a datastore to your api, head over here. There are some framework specific configuration you need to do to make the API talk to an online database, but then you will need to find that configuration on the framework documentation. The database could also be already up and living on your server, if this is the case you just need to configure your online backend to talk to that particular database at a particular address.
Once all of the above is done, re-test your application to check if you get the same behavior as before. This is a usable MVP, however there are no layer of security. Anyone with the right URL could just fetch your frontend and start messing around with your data.
There is more engineering that need to be done to make this a viable end product. This leads us to my final remark: why you are not using a product like Trello, Jira, or even Github Project? If it is to save some money on not paying for a subscription I think you should factor in the cost of development, security and maintenance of this application.
Hope it helps!

One simple option is Heroku for deploy your API and your frontend application.

How to re-architect a portal for creating mobile app

Currently I am working on a portal which is exposed to end users. This portal is developed using Python 2.7, Django 1.6 and MySQL.
Now we want to expose this portal as a mobile app. But current design does not support that as templates, views and database are tightly coupled with each other. So we decided to re-architect the whole portal. After some research I found following:
Client side: AngularJS for all client side operations like show data and get data using ajax.
Server side: Rest API exposed to AngularJS. This Rest API can be developed using either Tastypie or Django Rest Framework (still not decided). Rest API will be exposed over Django.
I have few questions:
What you guys think about architecture? Is this is a good or bad design? How it can be improved?
Will performance of portal will go down after adding above layers in architecture?
In the above architecture whether 2 servers should be used to run this (like one for client and other for serving the API's) or one server will be enough. Currently Heroku is used for deployment.
Currently portal is getting 10K hits in a day and it is expected to go to 100K a day in 6 months. Will be happy to provide more information if needed.

If i got an opportunity to architect the portal which you mentioned than i would really love to design the architecture which i have already explained here.

What you guys think about architecture?
This is a common Service Oriented Architecture with decoupled Clients. You just have REST endpoints on your backend, and any Client can consume those endpoints.
You should also think about:
Do you need RESTful service (RESTful == stateless, will you store any state on the server?)
How to scale the service in the future? (this is a legit thing as you already aware of huge traffic increase and assume 2 servers)
How it can be improved?
Use scala instead of python :)
Will performance of portal will go down after adding above layers in architecture?
It depends.
It will get some performance penalty (any additional abtract layer has it's tax), but most probably you won't event notice it. But still, you should measure it using some stress tests.
In the above architecture whether 2 servers should be used to run this (like one for client and other for serving the API's) or one server will be enough. Currently Heroku is used for deployment.
Well, as usual, it depends.
It depends on the usage profile you have right now and on the resources available.
If you are interested in whether the new design will perform better than the old one? - there are a number of parameters.
Resume
This is a good overall approach for the system with different clients.
It will allow you:
Totally decouple mobile app and frontend development from backend development. (It could be different independent teams, outsourceable)
Standardize your API layer (as all clients will consume the same endpoints)
Make you service scalable easier (this includes the separate webserver for static assets and many more).

choosing an application framework to handle offline analysis with web requests

I am trying to design a web based app at the moment, that involves requests being made by users to trigger analysis of their previously entered data. The background analysis could be done on the same machine as the web server or be run on remote machines, and should not significantly impede the performance of the website, so that other users can also make analysis requests while the background analysis is being done. The requests should go into some form of queueing system, and once an analysis is finished, the results should be returned and viewable by the user in their account.
Please could someone advise me of the most efficient framework to handle this project? I am currently working on Linux, the analysis software is written in Python, and I have previously designed dynamic sites using Django. Is there something compatible with this that could work?

Given your background and the analysys code already being written in Python, Django + Celery seems like an obvious candidate here. We're currently using this solution for a very processing-heavy app with one front-end django server, one dedicated database server, and two distinct celery servers for the background processing. Having the celery processes on distinct servers keeps the djangon front responsive whatever the load on the celery servers (and we can add new celery servers if required).
So well, I don't know if it's "the most efficient" solution but it does work.

Python application communicating with a web server? Ideas?

I'm looking for a bit of web development advice. I'm fairly new to the area but I'm sure there are some gurus out there willing to part with some wisdom.
Objective: I'm interested in controlling a Python application on my computer from my personal web hosted site. I know, this question has been asked several times before but in each case the requirements were a bit different from my own. To reduce the length of this post I'll summarize my objective in a few bullet points:
Personal site is hosted by a web hosting company
Site uses HTML, PHP, MySQL, Python and JavaScript, the majority of everything is coded by me from the ground up
An application that is coded in Python will run on a PC within my home and will communicate with an Arduino board
The app will receive commands from the internet to control actuation via the Arduino, and will transmit sensor data back to the site (such as temperature)
Looking for the communication to be bi-directional, fast and secure
Securing the connection between site and Python app would be most ideal
I'm not looking to connect to the Python application directly, the web server must serve as the 'middle man'
So far I've considered HTTP Post and HTML forms, using sockets (Python app would run as a web server), an IRC bot and reading/writing to a text file stored on the web server.
I was also hoping to have a way to communicate with the Python app without needing to refresh the webpage, perhaps using AJAX or JavaScipt? Maybe with Flash?
Is there something I'm not considering? I feel like I'm missing something. Thanks in advance for the advice!

Just thinking out loud for how I would start out with this. First, regarding the website itself, you can just use what's easiest to you, or to the environment you're in. For example, a basic PHP page will do just fine, but if you can get a site running in Python as well, I'd prefer using the same language all over.
That said, I'm not sure why you would need to use a hosted website? Given that you're already forced to have a externally accessible PC at home for the communication, why not run a webserver on that directly (Apache, Nginx, or even something like CherryPy should do)? That webserver can then communicate with the python process that is running to control your Arduino (by using e.g. Python's xmlrpclib). If you would run things via the hosting company, you would still need some process that can handle external requests securely... something a webserver is quite good at. Just running it yourself gives you all the freedom you want, and simplifies things by lessening the number of components in your solution.
The updates on your site I'd keep quite basic: commands you want to run can be handled in the request handlers of the webserver by just calling the relevant (xmlrpclib) calls. Dynamically updating the page is best done by some AJAX calls I reckon. Based on your story, these updates are easily put in a JSON object, suitable for periodically updating only the relevant segments of your page.

Multi tier architecture implementation on Python

I need to create web application, which can be reached by user as regular web site and as XML-RPC web service. Also web site should have mobile version. I'm planning to use next technologies:
Django (for web frontends (regular and mobile)).
Pyramid (for web service).
SQLAlchemy, Memcached (for persistence level)
Later other projects can reach this data and providing logic, so I think it is better to make two tiers. I see it in next way:
Tier 1. Main logic service level. This level will provide API for frontend applications (Django powered web site, for example).
Tier 2. Different mostly end client applications (web site, API for remote client devices).
For communication between this tiers I'm planning to use XML-RPC protocol.
In this case it will be easy to scale it and add new front end application or connect another projects to this (I believe it).
I have main question, -- what can I use to make it easy build first tier? Maybe there is some framework good for that?
And what do you think about this whole architecture. Because I'm filling that I'm thinking in Java terms developing in Python. Maybe there is some another idioms in Python world for such situations.
Thanks for you time and help.
P. S.
Some links for reading are welcome.

This architecture really makes no sense. You're using Django, a full-stack web framework, for the front end, but not using it for the database. And you're using Pyramid, another full-stack web framework, for the web service side, thus ensuring that you duplicate all the business logic.
Much as I am an advocate of Django, I would say it has no place in your architecture. It looks like the only thing you're really using it for is URL routing and templates, both of which Pyramid does itself fine - you can even use Jinja2, which is based on Django's template language, as the template language in Pyramid if you like.
Doing it this way means that you can share the business logic between the front-end and web service code, since you'll almost certainly find that a lot of it will be the same.
I must say also that I don't understand the division into tiers, which you have described as separate from the front-end/web service division. To me, the web service is the second tier. It makes no sense to have a further division.

You should checkout the Turbogears framework as it is composed of several popular components: ORM with sqlalchemy, pylons for logic and support for WSGI, permits support for several templating engines for the frontend... endless.
I use it for several web-services behind AJAX-enabled front-ends (like Flex-based apps, among others). You can front end the TG2-based webapp with apache or your favorite WSGI-enabled web server too.
Checkout their website since they have a tutorial to setup a wiki in 20 minutes.
Cheers!