HA Wordpress Setup with AWS?

DHR · 9 Nov 2016 at 17:45

I'm waning to up my skill set a little more in AWS and have the perfect Wordpress project for it but might be a little ahead of my self!

I'm looking at setting up a Wordpress instance on EC2 with S3 holding data/assets etc for the app tier and RDS for the data tier. The idea is to have a highly available setup that meets best practice.

Cloudflare interests me too if there are any huge benefits to it in this scenario?

I was hoping to have a test server that pulls site assets in from the production setup in read only mode too if at all possible? Not done that before I though so it'd be a nice to have.

Backups I can drag down are also a factor but I can look into that further later on.

ov_sjo · 10 Nov 2016 at 14:24

How do you intend to use S3 exactly? I was under the impression it provided an abstracted storage layer - wasn't aware that WordPress supported anything like that.

Sp00n · 10 Nov 2016 at 15:15

It's entirely possible with s3 for the storage and rds for the database.

As you are just looking to gain some experience then you should totally look at Cloudflare, they have a free tier which should be fine to get you up and running and you can have wordpress over https using a cloudflare cert.

Having not really done anything fancy with Wordpress your idea of a test server to pull in assets also seems to be straight forward and could be achieved with rsync perhaps.

DHR · 10 Nov 2016 at 17:26

Cheers guys, I've been doing more reading and there is a problem in using S3, you can use it but it requires a Wordpress plugin. I've since found out that this approach means you can have difficult using auto updates, themes etc.

By all accounts using EFS gets around that issue...

Sp00n · 10 Nov 2016 at 18:54

You could use s3fs on the underlying file system and share the wordpress installation out to however many hosts you like, you could probably even make them auto scale without too much effort.

DHR · 10 Nov 2016 at 19:30

Been trying to get it rolled out with a cloudformation template I've found but I just keep getting failures at certain points...

19:24:06 UTC+0000 ROLLBACK_IN_PROGRESS AWS::CloudFormation::Stack wordpress-ha The following resource(s) failed to create: [WebServerIAMRole, EFSFileSystem, LoadBalancer, WebServerSecurityGroup]. . Rollback requested by user.

19:24:05 UTC+0000 CREATE_FAILED AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup WebServerSecurityGroup Resource creation cancelled
Physical ID:wordpress-ha-WebServerSecurityGroup-1TWPLM0SRC2TE

19:23:51 UTC+0000 CREATE_FAILED AWS::EFS::FileSystem EFSFileSystem Resource creation cancelled
Physical ID:fs-403cea09

19:23:51 UTC+0000 CREATE_FAILED AWS::IAM::Role WebServerIAMRole Resource creation cancelled
Physical ID:wordpress-ha-WebServerIAMRole-1WA6ALVBS7KRN

19:23:50 UTC+0000 CREATE_FAILED AWS::ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer LoadBalancer Server Certificate not found for the key: arn:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx_edited

..... starting to think I'm past it!

Edit - Cracked it. So much to learn though here it's shocking.