Hosting a Wordpress Application on ECS Fargate with RDS, Parameter Store, and Secrets Manager

How to deploy a WordPress application using several AWS services, including: Amazon RDS, AWS Systems Manager, Parameter Store, Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, and Application Load Balancers.

1Verify Resources and Create Database Subnet Group

  • Before you begin, please verify the required resources below exist and if any of these do not exist, please exit the lab and restart.

    Type
    Name

    Application Load Balancer

    OurApplicationLoadBalancer

    Security Group

    ALBAllowHttp

    Cloud9 Environment

    OurCloud9Environment

    IAM Role

    OurEcsTaskExecutionRole

    IAM Role

    OurEcsTaskRole

  • Create a new Database Subnet Group within RDS

  • Name it database-subnet-group

  • Select the us-east-1a, us-east-1b, and us-east-1c AZs

  • Select the subnets with the CIDRs of 10.0.20.0/24, 10.0.21.0/24, and 10.0.22.0/24

2Create the Amazon RDS Instance

Create a new RDS database:

  • Select MySQL for the engine type

  • Use the default engine version

  • Ensure it is a Free Tier template

  • Name your cluster identifier wordpress

  • Set the Master username to admin

  • Enable Manage master credentials in AWS Secrets Manager with the default AWS KMS encryption key

  • Select a db.t4g.micro burstable class instance type

  • Create a 20 GiB volume using a gp3 volume type

  • Use the database subnet group from the DB subnet group dropdown

  • Make sure it is not publicly accessible

  • Create a new Security Group for it called database-sg with No preference for the Availability Zone

  • Create an initial database named wordpress

3Update the RDS Security Group Rules

  • Edit the inbound rules for the database-sg that you created

  • Delete the existing rule and add a new inbound rule with the following information:

Type
Protocol
Port range
Source
Value
Description - optional

MYSQL/Aurora

TCP

3306

Custom

10.0.0.0/16

Allow MySQL access from VPC

4Create the Parameter Store Parameters and Verify Secrets Manager Secret

  • Within the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store capability, create 2 new parameters with the below information.

  • After complete, verify there is a new secret in Secrets Manager and retrieve the secret value to view your admin credentials.

Name
Description
Tier
Type
Data type
Value

/dev/WORDPRESS_DB_HOST

Wordpress RDS endpoint

Standard

String

text

YOUR_RDS_ENDPOINT:3306 (Example: wordpress-rds.cc5tzmus2oai.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:3306

/dev/WORDPRESS_DB_NAME

Wordpress RDS Database Name

Standard

SecureString (default encryption)

text

wordpress

5Create the Private ECR Repository

Within the Amazon ECR service, create a new private repository:

  • Select private repositories

  • Create a new one

  • Set Visibility settings to Private

  • For Repository name enter wordpress

  • Leave Tag immutability disabled

  • Enable the Scan on push option

  • Leave KMS encryption disabled

6Create IAM User Access Keys

Create a new set of access keys for your IAM user:

  • Within the AWS IAM console, select your IAM user

  • Create a new set of access keys

  • Save the access key and secret access key values for later

7Configure AWS Cloud9

Navigate to Cloud9 in a new tab:

  • Open the OurCloud9Environment environment

  • Clear any messages that popup

  • Run aws configure --profile cloud_user

  • Paste in your recently created access keys when prompted

  • Use us-east-1 as the default Region

  • Use json as the default output

  • If you get a popup about AWS managed temporary credentials, select Cancel and then Re-enable after refresh

  • Test you can perform an AWS CLIv2 command (Example: aws s3 ls --profile cloud_user)

8Push Image to ECR Repo from Cloud9

Navigate back to the ECR tab:

  • Click on View push commands

  • Copy and paste Step 1 into your Cloud9 terminal. Before entering, add the --profile cloud_user to the portion before the pipe! Example below:

aws ecr get-login-password --region us-east-1 --profile cloud_user | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin 111111111111.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

  • Pull the latest Docker image for Wordpress running this command:

   docker pull wordpress:latest

  • Once complete, tag the image to push by copying and pasting Step 3 from the ECR push commands prompt

  • Now run Step 4 from the ECR push commands.

  • Verify the image exists within the ECR console after completion

9Create the Amazon ECS Task Definition

Navigate to the Amazon ECS service in a new tab:

  • Find task definitions and create a new one

  • Enter wordpress-td for the Task definition family

  • Under Infrastructure requirements, for Launch type, select AWS Fargate

  • Select OurEcsTaskRole for the Task role

  • For the Task execution role, find and select the role OurEcsTaskExecutionRole

  • Under Container - 1, enter the following settings for Container details:

Name
Image URI
Essential container

wordpress

Your ECR Image URI from the custom image you pushed (Example: 294991935974.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/wordpress:latest)

Yes

  • Click on Add environment variable and then fill in the information for each of the following 4 variables. PLEASE NOTE THE ARN SYNTAX OF THE SECRETS MANAGER SECRET.

Key
Value type
Value

WORDPRESS_DB_HOST

ValueFrom

ARN of the respective Parameter Store parameter (Example: arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1:552898056824:parameter/dev/WORDPRESS_DB_HOST

WORDPRESS_DB_NAME

ValueFrom

ARN of the respective Parameter Store parameter (Example: arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1:552898056824:parameter/dev/WORDPRESS_DB_NAME

WORDPRESS_DB_USER

ValueFrom

ARN of the respective Secrets Manager RDS secret with :username:: added to the end specifying the specific key value (Example: arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-1:552898056824:secret:rds!db-1380b131-f0b2-4ef3-833f-4ab7a78f29fd-BAsjMA:username::

WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD

ValueFrom

ARN of the respective Secrets Manager RDS secret with :password:: added to the end specifying the specific key value (Example: arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-1:552898056824:secret:rds!db-1380b131-f0b2-4ef3-833f-4ab7a78f29fd-BAsjMA:password::

  • Create the task definition

10Create the Amazon ECS Cluster

Within ECS, select Clusters:

  • Create a new cluster

  • For Cluster name enter Wordpress-Cluster

  • Under Infrastructure, select AWS Fargate (serverless)

  • Once completed, move on to creating our service

Wait for the cluster creation to complete before moving on. If you get any service related errors, please navigate to the CloudFormation template that is created for you by the service and retry the deployment.

Mark Complete11Create the Amazon ECS Service

Navigate to your recently created Wordpress-Cluster:

  • Under the Services tab, click on Create

  • For Compute options select Launch type

  • Make sure the Launch type is set to FARGATE

  • Make sure Platform version is set to LATEST

  • For Application type select Service

  • For Family, under Task definition, choose your wordpress-td task definition from the dropdown and use the LATEST version

  • Name your service wordpress-service

  • Set desired tasks to 1

  • For Networking, select Your Custom VPC

  • For Subnets, only select the ones titled Private Subnet

  • Create a new security group called app-sg

  • For Inbound rules for security groups, enter the following information:

Type
Protocl
Port range
Source
Values

HTTP

TCP

80

Source group

Security Group of the ALBAllowHttp

  • Make sure Public IP is turned off

  • For Load balancer type, select Application Load Balancer

  • Use an existing load balancer

  • Find the load balancer named OurApplicationLoadBalancer

  • Set the Health check grace period to 30 seconds

  • Leave the Listener values as default

  • For Target group, name it wordpress-tg

  • For the Health check path, enter /wp-admin/images/wordpress-logo.svg

  • Create

Run Progress Check12Test the Application

  • Navigate to the Amazon EC2 console

  • Find and select the OurApplicationLoadBalancer ALB

  • Copy the DNS name

  • Paste the DNS name into a new tab using HTTP

  • You should be greeted by the Wordpress setup page!

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