Migrate the WordPress Database to AWS RDS

In this chapter, we’ll migrate the MariaDB database, which is currently hosted on the same EC2 instance as WordPress, to an external RDS MariaDB database.

Doing so allows us to separate the components of the WordPress application and scale them individually. By using RDS, we gain access to all of the options AWS provides to scale and operate databases efficiently.

Migration steps

Let’s take a look at the steps involved to migrate the database.

Step 1: Launch WordPress instance from launch template

The first step is to recreate the WordPress instance. To do so, we can use the new launch template.

Execute the following command in the terminal:

The command starts a new instance based on the launch template with the name custom-wordpress-vpc.

• The --query parameter filters the output to only display the InstanceId and the PublicIpAddress. We’ll use PublicIpAddress to connect to the WordPress instance via SSH.
• --output text formats the output as text.

Run the command above. The output should look similar to this:

Now, it seems that instead of a PublicIpAddress, we got None. This can happen because the public IP address will only be assigned once the instance is ready.

Therefore, let’s wait a bit and run the following command after a few minutes:

We’re using the describe-instances command with the --filters parameter and only select instances that ...