At OptimalBI we love Amazon Web Services (AWS). We are also partial to a bit of WordPress in our web diet at some point. Recently we have deployed WordPress in more reliable and repeatable fashion.
Here is a good list of a few resources we have used to come up with our best practices. You can also expect a blog in the near future on how exactly we build our WordPress clusters, so come back soon (or subscribe) to see that one.

Installing WordPress

There are millions of guides on installing WordPress, but I like the DigitalOcean guides for use of use. We use Ubuntu 16.04 for most of the servers here so this is the guide I used to install WordPress. DigitalOcean also has a guide for installing WordPress with Caddy, which is a great idea as it gives you HTTPS for free among some other fantastic features. Here is the guide if you want to go that route. We just stuck with using Apache as we will be using ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) anyway.

Understanding WordPress Architecture

WordPress has pretty standard architecture for a web service of its age. It has a core web server that uses MySQL to store information and php (through Apache or another web engine) to serve web requests. It doesn’t require much understanding of the WordPress architecture to get WordPress, but a little never hurts. I just went to WordPress’s default documentation for everything I needed to know.

WordPress ELB and CloudFront

We use ELB into CloudFront to serve our WordPress to the world. This is quite easy to configure with a few gotchas to look out for. While it’s not a perfect guide I used this blog from Amazon themselves to get me started on WordPress deployment.
That should be a pretty good starting point for getting WordPress running properly on AWS. Hopefully I can get a step-by-step blog written soon but until then…
Tim Gray
Coffee to Code