Wordpress deployment in a scalable infrastructure

A scalable infrastructure is comprised by a web server with a load balancer and multiple instances that are provisioned in periods with high demand. In order to ensure persistence a database instance is required. Static files are stored in a network file system (NFS).

Persistence VMs

Create two VM that will handle persistence

• web-storage

• web-db

Web Server

The web server has a load balancer and multiple instances that run the application. Cloud providers ensure the capabilities required to provision the infrastructure.

We will start the configuration by creating a Web Server with one instance. This will allow us to start with the minimal configuration required for the application and new instances will be added based on the snapshot of the master instance.

Creating the Web Server example

1. Select Programming Language: PHP

2. Select Web Server Type: nginix

3. Select Cloud: DigitalOcean

4. Select Location: Amsterdam

5. Select Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04

6. Select Plan: 2 vCPU /2 GB

Number of Servers: 1

Web Servers Name: web

Provisioning the resources will take around 10 minutes. When the operation is completed you should be able to see the load balancer and droplet in Digitalocean's dashboard.

Install Wordpress

Scale the infrastructure

Scaling the infrastructure to match our demand is a matter of increasing the number of instances.

Wordpress config

if($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']=="/index.php")
{
    define('WP_HOME','http://shop.dovelopers.com');
    define('WP_SITEURL','https://shop.dovelopers.com');
} else {
    define('WP_HOME','https://shop.dovelopers.com');
    define('WP_SITEURL','http://shop.dovelopers.com');
}

Pricing

Performance improvements

Enable opcache

Speeding up WordPress and PHP with Zend OPcache - GraspingTech

Network file system VM (nfs)

This step is optional. You only need to do it if you want to manually configure the nfs

Install NFS

sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

Create a directory

sudo mkdir /nfsdata

Edit /etc/exports file

sudo nano /etc/exports

Add the following content at the end of the file and save it

/nfsdata 10.0.0.0/8(rw,sync,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash)

Export share

sudo exportfs -rav

Mount NFS

sudo apt install nfs-common

sudo showmount --exports <private_ip_of_nfs_server>

Edit /ect/fstab

<privateip_of_nfs_server>:/nfsdata    /var/www    nfs    defaults,nfsvers=3,noatime    0    0

sudo mount -a