Serverless Architecture For Augmenting WordPress - Japh Thomson
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We needed to scale the serving of responsive images for a large WordPress installation in an efficient and cost-effective way. This is the story of how we took advantage of technologies outside of WordPress itself, leaning on Amazon Web Services, to achieve that.
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Serverless Architecture For Augmenting WordPress - Japh Thomson
- 1. SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE FOR AUGMENTING WORDPRESS A Case Study by Japh Thomson
- 2. SETTING THE SCENE Limitations of traditional platforms and responsive images
- 3. RESPONSIVE CHALLENGES ➤ Many devices … many sizes ➤ Lots of storage space ➤ Lots of bandwidth ➤ Intensive processing
- 4. PROBLEM? Many sites, lots of traffic, many devices, lots of images
- 5. PROBLEM! ➤ Large blog networks ➤ Two with 8M+ page views per month each ➤ Fashion / Foodie / Lifestyle niche ➤ Many blogs, many bloggers, many photos ➤ About 2TB of images and growing ➤ Processing, storage, bandwidth…
- 6. WORDPRESS ➤ Responsive image sizes handled natively (since 4.4) ➤ Can handle creation of multiple image files for sizes ➤ Can’t really solve the entire problem at this level
- 8. TACHYON ➤ Deals with image resizing on- the-fly ➤ “Faster than light image processing.” ➤ Inspired by / Forked from WordPress.com's Photon ➤ PHP-based ➤ Switched from Graphics Magic to Image Magick ➤ Hosted on AWS ➤ Backed by S3 ➤ Sits behind CloudFront
- 9. WORDPRESS PLUGIN ➤ Plugin rewrites URLs ➤ Images on S3 to Tachyon URLs ➤ WordPress handles the specific responsive image size required
- 10. TACHYON IN NODE.JS ➤ Faster and better threading ➤ Uses Sharp for image processing ➤ Can also be configured as a proxy for the main process to run in Lambda…
- 11. WHAT IS LAMBDA? ➤ AWS Service ➤ “Run code without having to think about servers” ➤ Renting processing time on a server, rather than the whole server ➤ Can run Node.js, Python, or Java
- 12. TACHYON ON LAMBDA ➤ Serverless! (Almost) ➤ Still need the proxy, until AWS API Gateway can return binary data from Lambda functions ➤ Nginx proxy is very thin and fast ➤ Inherently scalable
- 20. RESULTS Does the customer care?
- 21. PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING ➤ Saving money on storage, as image sizes are generated on- the-fly, stored in the CDN ➤ Faster for visitors as more device sizes can be covered ➤ Saving money on processing, as Lambda is only called when needed, no EC2 instances sitting around ➤ Fun to work on!