WordPress can now run on Amazon S3

Hello Artem! This looks very promising!

I have just a couple of questions.

I’m currently developing wordpress applications built on Bitnami’s WordPress Multisite Amazon Cloud Image Stacks

I have memecache and apc php extensions enabled, are they compatible with ClouSE?

Do you know of any wordpress multisite compatibility issues?

Currently setting up a wordpress multi-site network application has it’s challenges. Namely, syncing up a content delivery network, domain mapping, and client side cache.

Does this almost null and void the need for these because we’re already operating in the S3 environment?

I’ve already started my own instance! Could you shine a little light on these questions for me before I dig to deep?

Best Regards! Dustin

Hi Dustin,

Thank you for the question!

>multisite compatibility issues
While we have not tried all the possible configurations in our testing, I don’t anticipate any incompatibilities on the ClouSE level – fundamentally any (well, most) LAMP applications should just work.
In case there is any issue with the plugin, please let me know – we’ll figure something out.

>a content delivery network, domain mapping, and client side cache.
In a general case all these tools will continue adding value.

However it might be worthwhile to reevaluate the applicability of these solutions in your specific situation.
e.g.
client side cache : you no longer need to cache media files, but you still might need other features if you use them.
CDN – s3 data is replicated across several availability zones (aka data centers) in one AWS region. Is it enough for your site’s customer base?

I’d appreciate if you were to let me know how you progress. I’ll be happy to unblock you!

thank you
-Artem

Hi Artem,

I am excited about the ClouSE! It would be a great solution for a lot of people!

Right now I am running my wordpress site on EC2 with a RDS database. I found some posts about how to modify the my.cnf/my.ini of RDS using AWS SDK command line toolkit. But didn’t find how to add the clouse.so to the MySQL plugin.

I found that you provided a solution to use S3 as a Media Server sometime ago. Is there any new progress on combining the power of S3 and RDS?

Two separate questions:
1) what is the advantage of using ClouSE vs mounting S3 bucket as a file system on EC2 to replace the wp-content folder?
2) CDN: when we use ClouSE with EC2 and S3, do we get CDN benefit automatically, or we still need to setup the CDN?

Thank you! Keep on the great work!

Bo

Hi Bo,
Thank you for the feedback and questions!

>RDS & ClouSE
As far as I know RDS folks don’t let you software on RDS instance. And yes, I’d love to see RDS running ClouSE one day, we are still figuring out how to get to that point.

Meanwhile you can use a separate Media Server to handle files for your web site if you are relying on RDS to serve the web site content.

Other questions:
> 1) what is the advantage of using ClouSE vs mounting S3 bucket as a file system on EC2 to replace the wp-content folder

If you could name a specific File System solution you are considering, I could provide a more detailed comparison.

Meanwhile let me list a few core advantages of using ClouSE for file management only over the described setup:
– When upload files are stored directly at Amazon S3 and accessible via URLs, it is the highly scalable cloud storage (and not the web server) that serves file downloads. This inherently reduces the load on the web server and allows serving more clients faster.
– Amazon S3 is eventually consistent storage. Understanding this very well ClouSE actually abstracts eventual consistency into strict consistency, so WordPress will always find the expected data in place.
– CDN configuration directly goes thru Amazon S3
– Web server becomes stateless and, if needed, you can always spin more copies of the web server to handle changes in traffic demands.
– Storage consumption goes up and down with the amount of data stored. This means no overallocation, no need to monitor space consumption, no downtime.
– No limits on file sizes or file numbers.
– Media files are uploaded to cloud storage as fast as physically possible because it relies on OblakSoft WebStor – high performance library for Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage.
– WP2Cloud handles media file uploads in a transactional manner. Either the whole file and all its derivative files (e.g. thumbnails for pictures) get uploaded or nothing does.
– ClouSE is going to support point in time recovery
– You run you site anywhere: change hosters, clouds, etc
– WP2Cloud and ClouSE are actively developed and supported!

Using ClouSE v1 for the whole site additionally unifies database and file system management, incl. eliminating the need in a backup.
ClouSE v2 will have even more advanced feature set.

>2) CDN: when we use ClouSE with EC2 and S3, do we get CDN benefit automatically, or we still need to setup the CDN?

With Amazon S3 storage you’ll need to setup CDN (more in my blog). Google Cloud Storage natively acts as CDN.