Amazon Web Services Best Practices for WordPress on AWS
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• To back up database content you need to make use of Aurora backup. Aurora
backs up your cluster volume automatically and retains restore data for the
length of the backup retention period. Aurora backups are nearly continuous and
incremental so you can quickly restore to any point within the backup retention
period. No performance impact or interruption of database service occurs as
backup data is being written. You can specify a backup retention period from 1 to
35 days. You can also create manual database snapshots, which persist until
you delete them. Manual database snapshots are useful for long-term backups
and archiving.
Appendix D: Deploying new plugins and themes
Few websites remain static. In most cases, you will periodically add publicly available
WordPress themes and plugins or upgrade to a newer WordPress version. In other
cases, you will develop your own custom themes and plugins from scratch.
Any time you are making a structural change to your WordPress installation there is a
certain risk of introducing unforeseen problems. At the very least, take a backup of your
application code, configuration, and database before applying any significant change
(such as installing a new plugin). For websites of business or other value, test those
changes in a separate staging environment first. With AWS, it’s easy to replicate the
configuration of your production environment and run the whole deployment process in
a safe manner. After you are done with your tests, you can simply tear down your test
environment and stop paying for those resources. Later, this whitepaper discusses
some WordPress-specific considerations.
Some plugins write configuration information to the wp_options database table (or
introduce database schema changes), whereas others create configuration files in the
WordPress installation directory. Because we have moved the database and storage to
shared platforms, these changes are immediately available to all of your running
instances without any further effort on your part.
When deploying new themes in WordPress, a little more effort may be required. If you
are only making use of Amazon EFS to store all your WordPress installation files, then
new themes will be immediately available to all running instances. However, if you are
offloading static content to Amazon S3, you must process a copy of these to the right
bucket location. Plugins like W3 Total Cache provide a way for you to manually initiate
that task. Alternatively, you could automate this step as part of a build process.