Following on from the second installment of our experiment to try and find which processor in the EC2 family of instances has the best price/performance we need to have a way to reliably build our WordPress stack for testing. CDK I’ve been using CloudFormation for many years now and have used a number of methods to orchestrate this. (Yes I wrote CloudFormation in JSON…). Reasonably early on I picked up and started to use CFNDSL to help construct CloudFormation and even wrote some an Ansible role and some very dodgy Ruby Rakefiles (sorry no public examples) to help orchestrate the CFNDSL code into CloudFormation and then manage validation (when cfn-lint became a thing) and ultimately build ChangeSets and deploy it. Read more

We do a lot of support of OpenSource CMS’s at work, and one of them happens to be WordPress. I recently thought it might be cool to have a bit more of a play with W3-Total-Cache as it is a plugin of choice to assist customer with scaling issues. Since my blog is massively popular (not!), I decided to use the S3/CloudFront option, presented here. Well it didn’t work. Very sad face. Read more