“Automate all the things!”

This weekend I’ve been busy laying much of the groundwork requires to be able to re-deploy this website. In part one, I provided a diagram that showed how the entire website, including the database, is deployed on a single droplet (VM). While this model has worked well for about three years, it’s time to move on. To that end, I’ve begun building automation to create and manage WordPress sites.

I’ve created a repo on Github to house the infrastructure code. It’s available here: https://github.com/seaburr/WordPressOnDigitalOcean

As you can see, I’ve decided to continue using DigitalOcean. They’ve proven reliable. Unfortunately, DigitalOcean lacks some things, like NFS, that would make the website even more scalable. Still, I don’t feel they’re necessary at this point.

Currently, I have the ability to create/destroy VMs, create/destroy/attach storage volumes, and a decent portion of the application installation is complete. It’s capable of going from nothing to the WordPress setup page over HTTP.

Finally, I know I could just move all of this to AWS LightSail but what’s the fun in that?? I learn best by doing and I want to have a deep understanding with all the moving parts. Once I’m done building this out with DO, I might do the same on the other major cloud vendors.