HOSTING SCALABLE WORDPRESS ON AWS

Architecture Diagram:

AWS Autoscaling will be the solution for our highly available and scalable WordPress site. AWS Autoscaling will take care of always having a minimum quantity of instances available for the public, and in case something goes wrong, it will replace the instance with a healthy one. This way our site will always be available. Autoscaling will also benefit our WordPress by creating instances based on the traffic demand and will help us to save costs while the traffic is low.

Here we first create a NFS for centralising our code:

For that we need a separate instance. I am using a basic t2.micro free tier instance with 8GB disk space.

SSH into this instance.

Update packages with yum:

#yum update

#Install nfs-utils,

#yum install nfs-utils

Make a directory for sharing:

#mkdir /vishnulal-tech

Change ownership of the directory appropriately:

#chown -R nfsnobody:nfsnobody /vishnulal-tech/

We need to enable and start necessary services for the proper working of NFS:

#systemctl enable rpcbind

#systemctl enable nfs-server

#systemctl enable nfs-lock

#systemctl enable nfs-idmap

#systemctl start rpcbind

#systemctl start nfs-server

#systemctl start nfs-lock

#systemctl start nfs-idmap

On next step we need to edit the /etc/exports file for sharing directory over the network:

#vi /etc/exports

Add the below line to the file:

/vishnulal-tech 172.31.16.0/20(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_all_squash)

I have shared the directory across the entire subnet CIDR. You can specify individual values if you want.

Just restart the NFS service and share the directory using exportfs command:

#systemctl restart nfs-server

#exportfs

Now let’s launch an EC2 instance for configuring our web server. (Here I am using Ubuntu 20.04 free tier eligible ami with t2.micro instance type, Open port 80 in the security group.)

Connect to your instance using ssh.

Update your ubuntu installation:

#apt update && apt upgrade

Install apache2:

#apt -y install apache2

Install php:

Install software-properties-common package:

#apt -y install software-properties-common

Add PHP repository:

#add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Now install PHP 7.4 and necessary extensions:

#apt -y install php7.4 php7.4-mysql

Install mariadb/mysql server:

Add Mariadb Repository Key to the system:

#apt-key adv –fetch-keys ‘https://mariadb.org/mariadb_release_signing_key.asc’

Now add Mariadb APT repository:

#add-apt-repository ‘deb [arch=amd64] http://mariadb.mirror.globo.tech/repo/10.5/ubuntu focal main’

Install mariadb server and client:

#apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Harden Mariadb server:

#mysql_secure_installation

Enter into mysql server console:

mysql -u root -p

Create new database:

CREATE DATABASE sfc_scale;

Grant privileges to a user on the database:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sfc_scale.* TO ‘sfc_scale’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘pa$$word’;

Now host the wordpress website on the server. (Here I’m using scale.spotfixcrew.com)

Apache Virtualhost file is given below:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName scale.spotfixcrew.com
     DocumentRoot /var/www/vishnulal-tech
<Directory /var/www/vishnulal-tech>
     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride All
     Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

We need to mount the NFS we created in the first instance to our document root.

First install nfs-common on our server:

#apt install nfs-common

mkdir -p /var/www/vishnulal-tech

Next, we need to mount the NFS shared directory,

vi /etc/fstab

172.31.26.12:/vishnulal-tech/ /var/www/vishnulal-tech nfs defaults 0 0