Hey! Creator of Empire here. The demo stack we provide isn't suitable for production use as you found out already. Empire can definitely be deployed in a production ready manor where you can have internal and external services, which is how we have it setup at Remind. The docs are a little lacking right now unfortunately, but we'll be improving this in the future.

We actually have a production ready example stack using our stack provisioning tool called stacker: https://github.com/remind101/stacker/pull/43.