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v.gd/wpaws

What This Talk Will Cover

Theory & Concepts
Planning
Step-by-step Example
Deployment
Pricing
Q&A

About Me

Russell Heimlich on a pogo stick in a suit

I’ve been playing with WordPress since 2007

Screenshot of Russell Heimlich's first blog post

Lead Developer at

When I’m not coding…

A Familiar Story…

We lasted 15 minutes…

How can we build a website that scales?

What is Scaling?

Scal•a•bil•ity—the capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work

via Scalability on Wikipedia

Horizontal Scaling

Vertical Scaling

Bigger Servers
Adding a CDN
Redis/Memcache

Pets vs. Cattle

Pets

Cutesy Names like Brutus, Penelope, Jenny
Unique, loving, cared for
When ill, you fix them

Cattle

Algorithmic names like ec18453ba, h65106z, 8675309
Nearly identical to other cattle
When ill, you replace them

Pets don't scale!

What is high availability?

Websites have many components

Achieving High Availability

Redundancy to reduce single points of failure
Graceful failover
Monitoring/alerts + automation

Nines	Availability	Downtime per Year
1	90%	36.5 days
2	99%	3.65 days
3	99.9%	8.76 hours
4	99.99%	52.56 minutes
5	99.999%	5.26 minutes
6	99.9999%	31.5 seconds
7	99.99999%	3.15 seconds
8	99.999999%	315.569 milliseconds
9	99.9999999%	31.5569 milliseconds

Planning

Do Your Homework!

What isn't working on your current host?
What is working?
What are the specs of your current host?
CPU and RAM usage?

Traffic Analysis

What was your busiest hour via Google Analytics?
Figure out how many requests per second that was
What type of page was that peak? Homepage? Article?
Bandwidth reports from current host?

Yearly Traffic Spikes

Pageviews by hour

13,322 pageviews per hour

÷ 60 minutes

÷ 60 seconds

= 3.70 pageviews per second

58 requests per pageview

x 3.70 pageviews per second

= 214.6 requests per second

What is Amazon Web Services?

Range of cloud services charged based on usage with no upfront costs.

Let's Build a Website Infrastructure from Scratch!

Pick a Region

Regions & Availability Zones

Regions are separate geographic area

Regions have multiple, isolated availability zones

Add a Server

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Virtual Servers

Launch a machine to connect to and install software on

What size server?

Stick with the T2 general purpose instances
Start small (t2.micro) and upgrade as needed

See 5 Steps for Finding Optimal EC2 Infrastructure

Add a Database

Relational Database Service (RDS)

Amazon SQL

Managed MySQL database

Add a Redis Caching Layer

Elasticache

Amazon Redis

Managed Redis/Memcached service

Add a 2nd Server

Add a Load Balancer

Add an S3 Bucket

Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon Unlimited FTP Server

Upload and serve static files from

SSL and S3 Buckets

Bucket names should be DNS compliant
Lower-case letters, numbers, hyphens

BAD: example.com.s3.amazonaws.com

GOOD: example-com.s3.amazonaws.com

Availability Zones and Autoscaling

Add a CDN

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CDN

KeyCDN ($0.04/GB) vs CloudFront ($0.08/GB)

Software

Pick an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type (64-bit)

Configuring a Server

Use EasyEngine.io

wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee && sudo bash ee

sudo ee site create example.com  \
	--wpsubdomain \
	--wpredis \
	--php7 \
	--user=admin \
	--pass=admin

* Requires Ubuntu or Debian OS

EasyEngine will install the following components + dependencies

nginx
PHP 7
WordPress Multisite with Subdomains
Full page caching using Redis

s3cmd

s3tools.org/s3cmd
Useful for syncing files to S3
```
sudo pip install s3cmd
```

Create an AMI of your Server

Use this image to launch new instances

WordPress Plugins

nginx Helper

Purges Redis cache based on WordPress events
Installed automatically by EasyEngine

WP Redis

Tells WordPress to use Redis for object caching
After installation, copy object-cache.php to /wp-content/

Add Redis configuration to wp-config.php

$redis_server = array(
  'host' => 'redis-xxxxxxxxxx.amazonaws.com',
  'port' => 6379,
);

WP Offload S3 Lite

Syncs uploaded media to S3
Rewrites uploaded media URLs to be served by S3 or a CDN

Load Testing

Apache Benchmarking (ab)

Free
Downloadable tool
Run on your own computer

loader.io

Free Plan
10,000 clients / test
In the cloud

Amazon Cloudwatch

Deployment

Because sometimes you need to change things

Pricing

~$220 per Month

Reserved Instances

Billing concept
Reduced hourly rate
Commitment to reserve resources

Free Tier

Discounted services for 12 months after signing up
Get a basic site up and running

Other Resources

Wrapping up!

AWS offers a lot of flexability…
…at the cost of complexity
Maybe cheaper?
A valuable skill to have

Thank You!

@kingkool68

Scaling WordPress on Amazon Web Services