Jelastic PaaS upgraded enterprise WordPress hosting solution in order to ensure high availability on all software stack layers within the cluster. Thus it сan meet the expectations of the most demanding user. In addition to auto-scalable application servers and clusterized databases, the newly launched package now also includes:
- Clustered load balancers (LiteSpeed or NGINX)
- Optimized GlusterFS storage with failover capabilities
Let’s deeper analyze each newly implemented functionality, how it can be used for your projects and what steps should be done to make the installation fully production-ready.
Load Balancing Layer High Availability
The load balancers(origins or endpoints) in the cluster topology can be either LiteSpeed Web ADC (Application Delivery Controller) or well known NGINX reverse proxy. It depends on your choice during the WordPress Cluster installation.
To handle incoming traffic, the load balancing layer comprises two nodes with public IP attached to each of them by default.
In order to distribute workload among the endpoints two load balancing algorithms can be employed:
- DNS Round-Robin distribution
- DNS Load Balancing with health checks
The endpoints set up for Round-Robin algorithm is similar to described one in our tutorial High Availability with DNS Round Robin Load-Balancing across Multiple Data Centers. Basically DNS Load Balancing with health checks is an advanced version of Round-Robin, therefore when you set up the second option the first one is set up by default. Such a balancing can be implemented with help of Cloudflare or any other similar service.
Shared Storage High Availability
Shared storage is a place where the web-servers keep static assets. To ensure high availability we added the possibility to choose three-node GlusterFS cluster inside our WordPress package.
GlusterFS is a distributed, parallel, fault-tolerant file system. The essential advantage of using it is a fault-tolerant design, bidirectional synchronization, capacity expansion/reduction with no downtime. The GlusterFS cluster is a native feature of Auto-Clustering functionality the platform provides for managed storage templates.
Highly-Available WordPress Cluster Installation
Usually, WordPress cluster setup and deployment are quite time-consuming and complicated but with Jelastic most of the configurations are automated and you just need to make a few clicks to specify installation preferences.
1. You can install WordPress Cluster Kit v2 from the Jelastic Marketplace or by importing the appropriate manifest.jps file from GitHub.
2. In the opened installation window, you can customize settings.
Where:
- Scaling Strategy parameter defines horizontal scaling policy to handle possible upcoming load growth in order to avoid WordPress application downtime. Jelastic allows to automatically scale in/out servers using specially configured triggers. Based on our experience, we offer three common scaling scenarios for WordPress to prevent overload (these settings can be adjusted after installation):
- Low Load
- adds 1 application server node if the workload is higher than 70%
- removes 1 application server node if the workload goes below 20%
- Medium Load
- adds 1 application server node if the workload is higher than 50%
- removes 1 application server node if the workload goes below 20%
- High Load
- adds 2 application server node at once if the workload is higher than 30%
- removes 1 application server node if the workload goes below 10%
- Low Load
- LiteSpeed High-Performance Web Server installs Web Server and Web Application Delivery Controller. This option provides the highest possible speed of website content delivery to the clients via modern HTTP/3 protocol. The NGINX web server and load balancer will be installed unless you checked this option.
- Brute Force Attacks Protection - saves WordPress applications from large-scale brute force attacks, which have the potential to gain unauthorized access to a website by repeatedly attempting to guess a valid username and password.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF) enables/disables the feature (applicable to the LiteSpeed Web Server only).
- MariaDB Galera Cluster is a multi-master database cluster based on synchronous replication and InnoDB engine. When using the Galera Cluster, you can perform direct read and write operations to any node. If any single instance goes down, there will be no cluster downtime and no complex failover procedures. In case you untick the checkbox, a master-master replication topology of the MariaDB database will be deployed.
- Let’s Encrypt SSL with Auto-Renewal add-on allows to issue and use a trusted, free certificate for a custom domain. The built-in functionality employs automatic certificate renewal. The appropriate notifications are sent by email.
- Lightning-Fast Premium CDN integrates Verizon Edgecast CDN into WordPress application.
- GlusterFS Cluster deploys a storage cluster which is an open-source distributed, parallel, fault-tolerant file system. It has a bidirectional synchronization and capacity expansion/reduction with no downtime. Unless you choose it, the regular NFS shared storage will be installed.
- WordPress Multisite Network automatically enables/disables the multisite feature that allows the application to act as a WordPress network hub with several websites.
3. If required, change the Environment name, Display Name, choose destination Region (if available), and click Install. Wait several minutes for Jelastic to set up your WordPress Cluster.
4. Follow the links and use credentials from the successful installation window to manage your WordPress application. Click the Open in Browser button to get your WordPress site welcome page.
This next-generation WordPress hosting package brings your website fault tolerance to the new level since all software stack layers are pre-configured to be highly available and resilient to any load spikes that may occur. Try it out at one of the Jelastic PaaS service providers.
