Hands-On: Run A Simple WordPress Blog on AWS, Part 1

Creating an AWS account

Educative courses are designed for us to jump in right away, so if you haven’t created an AWS account yet, please do so, or see the “Creating an AWS Account” lesson from the appendix to guide you through the process. We strongly recommend creating a new AWS account for this course or using an existing one without any running resources in it. It’s safer to do so, and some examples assume that you do not have anything else running in your AWS account.

It’s also helpful to set a budget to get warned about unexpectedly high costs. Please see the “Setting up a Budget as a Precaution” lesson in the appendix on how to do it.

Hands-on: Run a WordPress blog on AWS

Enough of the theory! Let’s run something on AWS.

As we discussed earlier, this course is about running WordPress in a scalable way. So, let’s start by running a WordPress hello world example on AWS.

The steps on a high level:

1. Find a WordPress AMI (Amazon Machine Image).
2. Start an EC2 instance (a virtual cloud server) with it.
3. Connect to the public URL to see the WordPress installation.
4. Destroy everything to avoid costs.

Note: The steps in the next lessons of this chapter are absolutely critical to continue with the rest of the course, so please make sure to follow along closely.

Open the AWS Console

The AWS Console (https://console.aws.amazon.com) is the main interface to interact with AWS, and we have already interacted with it when creating our account and setting up a budget.