SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE FOR AUGMENTING WORDPRESS

A Case Study by Japh Thomson

SETTINGTHE SCENELimitations of traditional

platforms and responsive images

RESPONSIVE CHALLENGES

➤ Many devices … many sizes

➤ Lots of storage space

➤ Lots of bandwidth

➤ Intensive processing

PROBLEM?Many sites, lots of traffic,

many devices, lots of images

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…

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

SOLUTION(S)A progression

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

WORDPRESS PLUGIN

➤ Plugin rewrites URLs

➤ Images on S3 to Tachyon URLs

➤ WordPress handles the specific responsive image size required

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…

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

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

VISUALISEAn evolving infrastructure

RESULTSDoes the customer care?

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!

THANKS!QUESTIONS?

@Japh from @HumanMadeLtd