I don't think Django could have talked to sqlite over the network, or would have really solved any problems. When I say physically separate, I mean it in the pre-cloud sense: one front end server (Django) dynamically connecting to a database on a remote server (based on the user account), which had a database continuously logging streams of sensor data from local IoT devices.

What I did was change the architecture to support centralized aggregation in a large co-located Postgres server, implementing security to managed permissions for writers (sensor gateway) and readers (user accounts).

Eventually we had to write a pg backend similar in concept to timescaledb to handle the massive scale of sensor data we were ingesting...but that's another story entirely.