Infracoders Graz Meetup: Aurora WP - Highest Flexibility and Automation for Managed WordPress Hosting

Karl Kowald, Managing Director of Lorem Ipsum web.solutions GmbH, gave a presentation on Aurora WP at the last Infracoders / DevOps / CloudNative Meetup with the title: "Highest Flexibility and Automation for Managed WordPress Hosting". Aurora WP is a WordPress hosting platform built by Lorem Ipsum web.solutions GmbH to offer its customers easy WordPress hosting.

The presentation

At the beginning, Karl introduced the characteristics of Aurora WP. In addition to high security by design, caching systems, high portability, scalability and flexibility in the configuration, automation is in the foreground.

The hardware and Ubuntu, Saltstack and GitLab form the basis for this. OpenZFS is used as a file system because snapshots are possible without any loss of speed and a transferable feature set exists. With Linux, NGINX, MySQL, and PHP fast working and above all an integration with Docker is possible.

Docker is used because it is flexible and innovative, and also allows easy hardening. Lorem Ipsum web.solutions GmbH has overcome the challenges of functional monitoring, the quantity and the updates of the contained packages as well as the systemcronjobs. WP-CLI allows easy management of WordPress installations.

Karl also tells us that Redis, Varnish, and Elasticsearch are good ways to achieve the desired goal faster. To ensure safety, he and his team work with Let's Encrypt. On the one hand, this certification center offers free SSL certificates. On the other hand, it offers a central update management and enables the monitoring and updates of the certificates to be completed in one work step. With Check MK and Logtash the basic monitoring is very easy and all relevant log files are visible at a glance.

Lorem Ipsum web.solutions GmbH works with WordPress. WordPress is widely used, provides a large and qualitative range of Plugins and lets updates easily implement. Aurora WP emerged out of personal use.

Finally, Karl gives an outlook into a web-based user interface for customers, into the consideration of whether an application firewall or at least ufw / iptables makes sense, how virus and malware scans can happen on file and database levels and much more.

The networking

We would like to thank Karl for the great presentation and also all Infracoders, who enriched the evening with their experiences and their input.