Q: What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source blogging tool and content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL that is used to power anything from personal blogs to high-traffic websites.
Q: Why should I host WordPress on AWS?
The first version of WordPress was released in 2003, and as such it was not built with modern elastic and scalable cloud-based infrastructures in mind. Through the work of the WordPress community and the release of various WordPress modules, the capabilities of this CMS solution are constantly expanding. Today it is possible to build a WordPress architecture that takes advantage of many of the benefits of the AWS platform. AWS provides a reliable, scalable, secure, and highly performing infrastructure for the most demanding applications.
Q: How long will it take for the stack to come up and running?
Launching a new Elastic Beanstalk environment usually takes less than 5 minutes, but may take longer if you launch a large number of instances or include a database instance. A database instance takes about 10 minutes to launch.
Q: Can I customize my app once it is hosted on AWS?
Most settings on your Elastic Beanstalk environment can be changed after launch. Application name, environment name, platform, and VPC assignment cannot be changed.
Q: What is the benefit of hosting an application on AWS and Elastic Beanstalk?
Elastic Beanstalk provides monitoring tools, resource management, and simple configuration options that make it easy to manage environments. You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.
Q: Will I own the resources in the stack?
All of the resources in your environment except the CNAME record that points to your load balancer are launched under your account. To avoid drift, you should only manage these resources using the functionality provided by Elastic Beanstalk.
Q: How can I change the configuration of my environment after it is created for me?
You can use the Elastic Beanstalk Management Console or EB CLI to change settings on a running environment, or save an environment's current configuration and apply it to another environment. You can also use configuration files to configure and extend the resources in your environment in the source code of your application.
Q: How do I scale my app in the event of more traffic?
Configure your environment's Auto Scaling group to launch more instances when traffic reaches a predefined threshold.
Q: How do I update the application?
Deploy a new version of your application's source code to a running environment with the Elastic Beanstalk Management Console or EB CLI.
Q: How can I learn more about security and security best practices on AWS?
Visit the AWS Security Center to learn more or to find resources on this topic.