Production-Grade WordPress on Kubernetes

Complete production-ready WordPress deployment on Kubernetes with Nginx (OpenResty + Lua), MySQL 8.0, and comprehensive monitoring using Prometheus/Grafana.

Architecture

┌─────────────────┐
│  LoadBalancer   │
└────────┬────────┘
         │
┌────────▼──────────┐
│ Nginx (OpenResty) │ (2 replicas)
│   with Lua        │ Port 80
└────────┬──────────┘
         │
┌────────▼──────────┐
│   WordPress       │ (2 replicas)
│   PHP 8.1-FPM     │ Port 9000
└────────┬──────────┘
         │
┌────────▼──────────┐
│   MySQL 8.0       │ (1 replica)
│                   │ Port 3306
└───────────────────┘

Monitoring:
┌─────────────┐    ┌──────────┐
│ Prometheus  │───▶│ Grafana  │
└─────────────┘    └──────────┘

Features

• ✅ Production-grade WordPress with PHP 8.1-FPM
• ✅ MySQL 8.0 with optimized InnoDB configuration
• ✅ Nginx with OpenResty (Lua scripting support)
• ✅ Persistent storage for database and WordPress files
• ✅ Horizontal scaling for WordPress and Nginx
• ✅ Prometheus metrics collection
• ✅ Grafana dashboards for monitoring
• ✅ Health check endpoints
• ✅ Resource limits and requests

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster (v1.24+)
• kubectl configured
• Docker (for building custom images)
• 20GB+ available storage

Quick Start

1. Deploy WordPress Application

# Create WordPress namespace
kubectl create namespace wordpress

# Deploy storage
kubectl apply -f k8s/mysql-pvc.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/wordpress-pvc.yaml

# Deploy MySQL
kubectl apply -f k8s/mysql-deployment.yaml

# Deploy WordPress
kubectl apply -f k8s/wordpress-deployment.yaml

# Deploy Nginx
kubectl apply -f k8s/nginx-deployment.yaml

# Verify deployment
kubectl get pods -n wordpress

Expected output:

NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
wordpress-mysql-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxx        1/1     Running   0          2m
wordpress-nginx-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxx        1/1     Running   0          1m
wordpress-nginx-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxx        1/1     Running   0          1m
wordpress-wordpress-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxx    1/1     Running   0          1m
wordpress-wordpress-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxx    1/1     Running   0          1m

2. Deploy Monitoring Stack

# Deploy Prometheus and Grafana
kubectl apply -f k8s/monitoring/namespace.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/monitoring/prometheus-rbac.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/monitoring/prometheus-config.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/monitoring/prometheus-deployment.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/monitoring/grafana-config.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/monitoring/grafana-deployment.yaml

# Verify monitoring pods
kubectl get pods -n monitoring

3. Access Applications

WordPress:

kubectl port-forward -n wordpress svc/wordpress-nginx 8080:80

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser

Grafana Dashboard:

kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/grafana 3000:3000

Open http://localhost:3000 (Login: admin / admin123)

Prometheus:

kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/prometheus 9090:9090

Open http://localhost:9090

Docker Images

All images are available on Docker Hub:

• charanbhatia/mysql-custom:latest - MySQL 8.0 with production config
• charanbhatia/wordpress-custom:latest - WordPress with PHP 8.1-FPM
• charanbhatia/nginx-openresty:latest - Nginx with OpenResty and Lua

Build Custom Images (Optional)

# MySQL
docker build -t charanbhatia/mysql-custom:latest -f docker/mysql/Dockerfile docker/mysql
docker push charanbhatia/mysql-custom:latest

# WordPress
docker build -t charanbhatia/wordpress-custom:latest -f docker/wordpress/Dockerfile docker/wordpress
docker push charanbhatia/wordpress-custom:latest

# Nginx with OpenResty
docker build -t charanbhatia/nginx-openresty:latest -f docker/nginx/Dockerfile docker/nginx
docker push charanbhatia/nginx-openresty:latest

Configuration

WordPress Environment Variables

Configured in k8s/wordpress-deployment.yaml:

env:
  - name: WORDPRESS_DB_HOST
    value: wordpress-mysql:3306
  - name: WORDPRESS_DB_NAME
    value: wordpress
  - name: WORDPRESS_DB_USER
    value: wpuser
  - name: WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD
    value: wppass

MySQL Configuration

Custom configuration in docker/mysql/custom.cnf:

• Max connections: 200
• InnoDB buffer pool: 256MB
• InnoDB log file size: 64MB
• Character set: utf8mb4
• Optimized for WordPress workloads

Nginx Configuration

Features:

• OpenResty with Lua scripting
• FastCGI proxy to WordPress PHP-FPM
• Custom logging format for metrics
• Health endpoint: /health
• Static asset caching
• Prometheus annotations for scraping

Scaling

Horizontal Scaling

Scale WordPress application:

kubectl scale deployment wordpress-wordpress -n wordpress --replicas=5

Scale Nginx:

kubectl scale deployment wordpress-nginx -n wordpress --replicas=5

Resource Configuration

Current resource limits per pod:

• MySQL: 512Mi-1Gi memory, 250m-500m CPU
• WordPress: 256Mi-512Mi memory, 200m-400m CPU
• Nginx: 128Mi-256Mi memory, 100m-200m CPU

Monitoring

Metrics Collected

• Pod CPU/Memory: Container resource usage
• Nginx Requests: Total HTTP requests
• Nginx Errors: 5xx error count
• Request Latency: Response time metrics
• MySQL Connections: Database connections
• Pod Status: Health and availability

Grafana Dashboards

Pre-configured dashboard includes:

1. Request Rate (per instance)
2. 5xx Error Rate
3. CPU Usage (per pod)
4. Memory Usage (per pod)

Prometheus Targets

Configured to scrape:

• Kubernetes pods with Prometheus annotations
• WordPress Nginx pods
• Prometheus self-monitoring

Persistence

MySQL Data

• PVC: wordpress-mysql-pvc
• Size: 10Gi
• Mount: /var/lib/mysql
• Access: ReadWriteOnce

Note: The PDF requirements specify ReadWriteMany for deployment scaling. However, Docker Desktop Kubernetes doesn't support ReadWriteMany with hostPath volumes. For production deployments on cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), use:

• AWS EFS (elastic file system)
• GCP Filestore
• Azure Files
• NFS-based storage solutions

To enable ReadWriteMany, update the PVC accessModes from ReadWriteOnce to ReadWriteMany and use an appropriate StorageClass.

WordPress Files

• PVC: wordpress-wordpress-pvc
• Size: 10Gi
• Mount: /var/www/html
• Access: ReadWriteOnce
• Init Container: Copies WordPress files on first boot

Troubleshooting

Check Pod Status

kubectl get pods -n wordpress
kubectl describe pod <pod-name> -n wordpress
kubectl logs <pod-name> -n wordpress

Check Services

kubectl get svc -n wordpress
kubectl get svc -n monitoring

Test Database Connection

kubectl exec -it <mysql-pod> -n wordpress -- mysql -u wpuser -pwppass wordpress -e "SHOW TABLES;"

Verify WordPress Files

kubectl exec -it <wordpress-pod> -n wordpress -- ls -la /var/www/html

Check Nginx Configuration

kubectl exec -it <nginx-pod> -n wordpress -- nginx -t

View Logs

# All WordPress pods
kubectl logs -l app=wordpress -n wordpress --all-containers=true

# Specific component
kubectl logs -l component=nginx -n wordpress -f
kubectl logs -l component=wordpress -n wordpress -f
kubectl logs -l component=mysql -n wordpress -f

Cleanup

Delete WordPress

kubectl delete namespace wordpress

Delete Monitoring

kubectl delete namespace monitoring

Delete Persistent Volumes

kubectl delete pv wordpress-mysql-pv wordpress-wordpress-pv

Production Considerations

Security

• ✅ Use Kubernetes Secrets for passwords
• ✅ Enable TLS/SSL with cert-manager
• ✅ Implement network policies
• ✅ Regular security updates
• ✅ Non-root container users

High Availability

• ✅ Multi-replica deployments
• ✅ Pod disruption budgets
• ✅ Readiness and liveness probes
• ✅ Rolling updates strategy
• ⚠️ Database replication (not implemented)

Backup Strategy

• ⚠️ Automated MySQL backups (not implemented)
• ⚠️ WordPress uploads backup (not implemented)
• ✅ Persistent volume snapshots available

Performance Optimization

• ✅ OpCache enabled for PHP
• ✅ Static asset caching in Nginx
• ✅ Resource limits configured
• ⚠️ Redis/Memcached caching (not implemented)
• ⚠️ CDN integration (not implemented)

Technical Details

OpenResty Compilation

Nginx compiled with OpenResty including:

./configure --prefix=/opt/openresty \
    --with-pcre-jit \
    --with-ipv6 \
    --without-http_redis2_module \
    --with-http_iconv_module \
    --with-http_postgres_module \
    --with-http_stub_status_module \
    -j8

PHP Extensions

Installed extensions:

• gd (image processing)
• mysqli, pdo_mysql (database)
• zip (file compression)
• opcache (performance)
• exif (image metadata)
• bcmath (calculations)
• redis (caching - driver installed)

WordPress Initialization

WordPress deployment uses init container to:

1. Check if WordPress files exist in PVC
2. Copy files from container to PVC on first boot
3. Preserve data across pod restarts

Project Structure

.
├── docker/
│   ├── mysql/              # MySQL 8.0 Dockerfile and config
│   ├── wordpress/          # WordPress PHP-FPM Dockerfile
│   └── nginx/              # Nginx OpenResty Dockerfile
├── k8s/
│   ├── mysql-pvc.yaml
│   ├── mysql-deployment.yaml
│   ├── wordpress-pvc.yaml
│   ├── wordpress-deployment.yaml
│   ├── nginx-deployment.yaml
│   └── monitoring/         # Prometheus & Grafana manifests
├── helm/                   # Helm charts (reference)
│   ├── wordpress/
│   └── monitoring/
└── README.md

License

MIT License

Author

Created for production WordPress deployment on Kubernetes with monitoring and observability.