WordPress Site in AWS Fargate with RDS DB Backend

This example lives in the pulumi/examples repository. Check out just this directory to use it:

$ git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/pulumi/examples pulumi-examples
$ git -C pulumi-examples sparse-checkout set aws-py-wordpress-fargate-rds
$ cd pulumi-examples/aws-py-wordpress-fargate-rds

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 __main__.py to see the defaults. However, you can override these defaults by using pulumi config to set the following values (e.g. pulumi config set service_name my-wp-demo).

• service_name - This is used as a prefix for resources created by the Pulumi program.
• db_name - The name of the MySQL DB created in RDS.
• db_user - The user created with access to the MySQL DB.
• db_password - The password for the DB user. Be sure to use --secret if creating this config value (e.g. pulumi config set db_password --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 lamp-test

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 db_password in the configuration as described above, you will not see the RandomPassword resource below.

   $ pulumi up
    +   pulumi:pulumi:Stack                  lamp-rds-wordpress-testing        create
    +   ├─ custom:resource:VPC               wp-example-net                    create
    +   │  ├─ aws:ec2:Vpc                    wp-example-net-vpc                create
    +   pulumi:pulumi:Stack                  lamp-rds-wordpress-testing        create.
    +   pulumi:pulumi:Stack                  lamp-rds-wordpress-testing        create
    +   │  ├─ aws:ec2:Subnet                 wp-example-net-subnet-us-west-2a  create
    +   │  ├─ aws:ec2:Subnet                 wp-example-net-subnet-us-west-2b  create
    +   │  ├─ aws:ec2:SecurityGroup          wp-example-net-rds-sg             create
    +   │  ├─ aws:ec2:SecurityGroup          wp-example-net-fe-sg              create
    +   │  ├─ aws:ec2:RouteTableAssociation  vpc-route-table-assoc-us-west-2a  create
    +   │  └─ aws:ec2:RouteTableAssociation  vpc-route-table-assoc-us-west-2b  create
    +   ├─ random:index:RandomPassword       db_password                       create
    +   ├─ custom:resource:Backend           wp-example-be                     create
    +   │  ├─ aws:rds:SubnetGroup            wp-example-be-sng                 create
    +   │  └─ aws:rds:Instance               wp-example-be-rds                 create
    +   └─ custom:resource:Frontend          wp-example-fe                     create
    +      ├─ aws:ecs:Cluster                wp-example-fe-ecs                 create
    +      ├─ aws:iam:Role                   wp-example-fe-task-role           create
    +      ├─ aws:lb:TargetGroup             wp-example-fe-app-tg              create
    +      ├─ aws:iam:RolePolicyAttachment   wp-example-fe-task-policy         create
    +      ├─ aws:lb:LoadBalancer            wp-example-fe-alb                 create
    +      ├─ aws:lb:Listener                wp-example-fe-listener            create
    +      └─ aws:ecs:Service                wp-example-fe-app-svc             create

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.