Highly Available Website in AWS

This is a simple WordPress website deployed on Elastic Beanstalk which automatically scale web apps. The Storage solution is a shared storage using Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). The database solution (Amazon RDS) will be external to the Elastic Beanstalk, making it easy for multiple environments to connect to the DB. Another benefit is that you can easily perform blue/green deployment without affecting the database.

Step 1 - Launching RDS DB with MySQL Engine

Since this is not in Prod, I'll be using the Dev/Test template but do note that if you're in Prod then you should use the Production template.

I'm selecting the Multi-AZ DB instance... However, note that there is now a new Deployment Option: Multi-AZ DB Cluster which let's you create a primary and 2 readable standby instances, each in a different AZ! With this new option, your standby supports and can serve read workloads! 👏
Do take note of your Master username & password. You'll need them to connect to the DB later.
In the Connectivity options, take note of your VPC, you'd need to place your app in the same VPC later on so they're within the same network. Also, if you plan to connect to your DB instance outside of this VPC network, then you need to select the option to make it Publicly Accessible. When configuring your Security Group, if you set it Publicly accessible, then configure inbound rules to allow the IP or block of IPs you want to have access and of course, allow access from the application (preferrably via the app SG).

Step 2 - Downloading WordPress (WP)

Do this part in CloudShell so your files are readily accessible from within AWS

Download the WP files using: curl https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.1.1.tar.gz -o wordpress.tar.gz
Download the config files from the sample repo: wget https://github.com/aws-samples/eb-php-wordpress/releases/download/v1.1/eb-php-wordpress-v1.zip
Extract the WordPress files. tar -xvf wordpress.tar.gz When it's done extracting, it creates a new directory wordpress and moves the extracted contents here.
You can skip this and cd wordpress. I chose to rename mine mv wordpress wp-bnstlk
cd wp-bnstlk

Step 3 - Launching an Elastic Beanstalk Environment

You can use this pre-configured URL to create your app.
For Platform, select PHP and accept defaults > Review and Launch > Create app. It takes a few minutes as it is creating other resources like your:
EC2 instance(s):
Load Balancer:
AutoScaling Groups:
CloudFormation Stack:
S3 Bucket:
CloudWatch alarms, Security Groups, Domain name (if you prefer, you can choose your domain name just before Review and Launch, I chose to leave mine blank so I'll get an auto-generated domain.)

Step 4 - Configure Security Groups & Environment Variables

In your environment, under Configuration, Edit the Instances option. Edit EC2 SG to make sure that it's letting the DB traffic on Port 3306 from the rds-SG Security Group.

Still in Configuration, navigate to Software this time > Edit > Scroll down to Environment Properties and enter the following then Apply:

Name	Property
`RDS_HOSTNAME`	This is the Endpoint of your DB instance
`RDS_DB_NAME`	The name of the database you create
`RDS_PASSWORD`	The password you created when setting up your RDS instance
`RDS_USERNAME`	The username you created when setting up your RDS instance
`RDS_PORT`	MySQL instance will run on Port 3306

When you navigate to your app URL, you should get a page that looks like this:

Step 5 - Update config files & Create Source Bundle

Create source bundle using zip ../wp-bnstlk.zip -r * .[^.]*
Your zip file (wp-bnstlk.zip) should now be created:
Download the created source bundle wp-bnstlk.zip. Go to Actions > Download file and provide the file path from CloudShell
In the Elastic Beanstalk env in the Management Console, click on Upload and deploy > upload the zip file you just downloaded.
Open website URL and perform the standard installation. Use the same settings previously configured for the Environment properties.

Step 6 - Installing and Setting Up WordPress

Navigate to your app URL in Elastic Beanstalk. If all works correctly, you should be prompted with the installation for WP.
Before continuing here, remember how we created an RDS instance earlier, we need to create a DB in that instance. You can connect to the DB instance using MySQL Workbench
create database everlydb;
Now we have a database we can use to configure the settings:
The remaining steps are pretty easy, just accept defaults and enter required information for WordPress to finish installing. If you want to, you can edit WP and use it with the database but we won't be going into that. The focus here is to show how to set up a highly available website in AWS. We have one more thing to do to ensure our setup is robust enough to handle high traffic, AutoScaling!