We’ve been reading some very interesting stuff about what happens when we mix the latest offerings from Amazon Web Services and good old WordPress.

We may be guilty of ‘drinking the kool aid’ here. But it’s tasting very good regardless.

So, to start with, take your common or garden WordPress site and drop it onto an Amazon EC2 service. Right, now it’s more reliable (and expensive to run).
Next, shift the database into Amazon RDS. This should be even more resilient.
So far so good, one last mod, move the filing system into Amazon S3.
Now we are ready to make things elastic. Add in amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Elastic Load Balancer. Move the DNS from Go Daddy/123-Reg and the like to Amazon Route53. Make copies of your EC2 Amazon Machine Image. Start up some new EC2 instances. Configure the ELB to spin up EC2 instances when needed, shut them down when not needed. And voila, we have a fully elastic WordPress site that maybe can scale to whatever you need.

Well that’s what they ‘kool aid’ says anyway.

Down sides – 1) it costs more, potentially a lot more e.g. if you are DoS attacked or mentioned on the 10 o clock news. 2) Updating themes and plug-ins is now a bit more complex. 3) There’s a lot more complexity that needs managing.

Pass the bottle opener…