WordPress Site in AWS Fargate with RDS DB Backend

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This example serves a WordPress site in AWS ECS Fargate using an RDS MySQL Backend.

It leverages the following Pulumi concepts/constructs:

• Component Resources: Allows one to create custom resources that encapsulate one’s best practices. In this example, component resource is used to define a “VPC” custom resource, a “Backend” custom resource that sets up the RDS DB, and a “Frontend” resource that sets up the ECS cluster and load balancer and tasks.
• Other Providers: Beyond the providers for the various clouds and Kubernetes, etc, Pulumi allows one to create and manage non-cloud resources. In this case, the program uses the Random provider to create a random password if necessary.

This sample uses the following AWS products (and related Pulumi providers):

• Amazon VPC: Used to set up a new virtual network in which the system is deployed.
• Amazon RDS: A managed DB service used to provide the MySQL backend for WordPress.
• Amazon ECS Fargate: A container service used to run the WordPress frontend.

Getting Started

There are no required configuration parameters for this project since the code will use defaults or generate values as needed - see the beginning of index.ts to see the defaults. However, you can override these defaults by using pulumi config to set the following values (e.g. pulumi config set serviceName my-wp-demo).

• serviceName - This is used as a prefix for resources created by the Pulumi program.
• dbName - The name of the MySQL DB created in RDS.
• dbUser - The user created with access to the MySQL DB.
• dbPassword - The password for the DB user. Be sure to use --secret if creating this config value (e.g. pulumi config set dbPassword --secret).

Deploying and running the program

Note: some values in this example will be different from run to run.

1. Create a new stack:

   $ pulumi stack init dev
   

2. Set the AWS region:

   $ pulumi config set aws:region us-west-2
   

3. Run pulumi up to preview and deploy changes. After the preview is shown you will be prompted if you want to continue or not. Note: If you set the dbPassword in the configuration as described above, you will not see the RandomPassword resource below.

   $ pulumi up
    + TBD
   

4. The program outputs the following values:

• DB Endpoint: This is the RDS DB endpoint. By default, the DB is deployed to disallow public access. This can be overriden in the resource declaration for the backend.
• DB Password: This is managed as a secret. To see the value, you can use pulumi stack output --show-secrets
• DB User Name: The user name for access the DB.
• ECS Cluster Name: The name of the ECS cluster created by the stack.
• Web Service URL: This is a link to the load balancer fronting the WordPress container. Note: It may take a few minutes for AWS to complete deploying the service and so you may see a 503 error initially.

1. To clean up resources, run pulumi destroy and answer the confirmation question at the prompt.

Troubleshooting

503 Error for the Web Service

AWS can take a few minutes to complete deploying the WordPress container and connect the load balancer to the service. So you may see a 503 error for a few minutes right after launching the stack. You can see the status of the service by looking at the cluster in AWS.

Deployment Speed

Since the stack creates an RDS instance, ECS cluster, load balancer, ECS service, as well as other elements, the stack can take about 4-5 minutes to launch and become ready.