AWS EC2 and Amazon Linux: Setting Up High Availability for WordPress

To ensure your WordPress site is highly available, you can leverage AWS services such as Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Auto Scaling. This article provides a step-by-step guide to setting up these services for your WordPress site running on Amazon Linux.

Prerequisites:

• WordPress installed and configured on an Amazon Linux instance
• Basic knowledge of AWS services

Steps:

1. Configure an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB):
   In the AWS Management Console, navigate to the EC2 Dashboard and select Load Balancers from the left-hand menu. Click Create Load Balancer and select the Application Load Balancer type.
   Configure the load balancer settings, including the name, scheme, and IP address type. Select the VPC and subnets that your EC2 instances are running in.
   Configure the security group to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic:
   • HTTP: Port 80, Source: 0.0.0.0/0 (Anywhere)
   • HTTPS: Port 443, Source: 0.0.0.0/0 (Anywhere)

   Configure the listener and target group settings. Create a new target group for your WordPress instances, specifying HTTP as the protocol and providing the health check settings.
   Register your existing EC2 instances with the target group and review and create the load balancer.

2. Set Up Auto Scaling:
   Navigate to the Auto Scaling Groups section in the EC2 Dashboard and click Create Auto Scaling Group. Provide a name for the group and select the launch configuration or template that matches your existing WordPress instance.
   Configure the group size, specifying the minimum, desired, and maximum number of instances. Ensure that the group spans multiple Availability Zones for high availability.
   Attach the load balancer target group created in the previous step to the Auto Scaling group. Configure the scaling policies to adjust the number of instances based on CPU utilization or other metrics.
3. Configure Route 53 for DNS Management:
   To manage your DNS and direct traffic to your load balancer, use AWS Route 53. Navigate to the Route 53 dashboard and create a hosted zone for your domain.
   Create a new A record, selecting Alias and pointing it to your load balancer’s DNS name. This ensures that traffic to your domain is directed to the load balancer, which distributes it across your WordPress instances.

With these steps, you have set up a highly available infrastructure for your WordPress site using AWS services. The Elastic Load Balancer distributes traffic across multiple instances, while Auto Scaling ensures that the number of instances adjusts based on demand.

In the final article, we will cover monitoring and maintaining your high availability WordPress site.