Tutorial: Deploy a Highly Available WordPress Instance as a StatefulSet in Kubernetes 1.5

At The New Stack, we covered various strategies for running stateful workloads on the Kubernetes container orchestration engine. This article takes a practical, hands-on approach to deploying a highly available WordPress application in Kubernetes based on the strategies and best practices that were discussed earlier. We will cover everything from setting up the Kubernetes cluster to configuring shared storage to deploying the stateful application to configuring auto scaling of the application.

Deploying and managing traditional workloads such as databases and content management systems in a containerized environment calls for a different approach. While it may be easy to package, deploy, manage, and scale contemporary, cloud native applications in Kubernetes, managing a MySQL cluster or a fleet of WordPress containers requires an understanding of how storage, networking, and service discovery work in Kubernetes environment. We will explore these concepts in the context of running a reliable, highly available content management system (CMS) powered by MySQL and WordPress.

Attributes of a Highly Available WordPress Deployment

WordPress is a stateful application the relies on two persistence backends: A file system and MySQL database. To ensure high availability of the application, we need to maximize the uptime of the core PHP application, the underlying storage layer backing the file system, and the data tier powered by MySQL.

When the traffic increases, the core PHP application should elastically scale to meet the load requirements. Each new instance should have read/write access to the file system to access and update the content. The file system capacity should proportionally increase as the content grows. Though not completely elastic, the data tier should also be able to scale-in and scale-out on-demand.

Kubernetes and other container management platforms support scaling the stateless PHP application effortlessly. However, scaling the storage backend and the MySQL data tier is not an easy task. The concept of StatefulSets, introduced in Kubernetes 1.5 precisely address the issue of scaling stateful workloads. We will leverage this concept in designing our deployment strategy.

Read the entire article at The New Stack

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.