📌 Project Overview

A client approached us with a challenge that’s becoming more common—handling sudden traffic surges on their WordPress website. At times, their site would spike to 50,000 concurrent users, yet their existing infrastructure couldn’t scale effectively. Even worse, they were locked into a cloud setup costing $1,200/month, regardless of actual usage.

We were brought in to overhaul their architecture with a goal to:

• Enable real-time scalability
• Reduce cloud spend
• Improve resilience and reliability
• Enhance observability and security

☸️ Why We Chose Kubernetes for WordPress and MySQL

To build an infrastructure that could dynamically adapt to user traffic, we containerized the entire stack using Kubernetes. This allowed us to manage WordPress and MySQL as independent services with self-healing capabilities, rolling updates, and auto-scaling—all while maintaining environment consistency across development, staging, and production.

Kubernetes offered the operational flexibility and control needed for a high-traffic WordPress deployment.

📊 Handling Traffic Spikes with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

We implemented Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) to manage WordPress application pods dynamically. HPA tracked real-time CPU and memory usage and scaled pods accordingly—up during traffic spikes and down when demand dropped.

This meant that the system could now automatically adjust to user load in real time, maintaining speed and stability while keeping infrastructure lean during off-peak hours.

💾 Solving Storage Challenges with EFS and EBS

Storage posed a unique challenge. WordPress uploads needed to be accessible across multiple pods, but EBS volumes can only attach to one pod at a time. To solve this, we implemented a hybrid storage strategy.

• Amazon EFS was used to store all WordPress uploads, providing simultaneous access across all pods and availability zones.
• Amazon EBS was retained for MySQL data and backup volumes, ensuring low latency and high performance for database operations.

This combination gave us both flexibility and stability where it mattered most.

💡 Smarter Node Autoscaling with Karpenter

While HPA handled application-level scaling, we used Karpenter to autoscale the underlying compute infrastructure. Karpenter provisioned EC2 instances on-demand, selecting the most cost-effective instance types for the workloads.

This significantly reduced idle resources and lowered overall cloud spend—cutting compute costs by up to 40% while still meeting performance requirements.

🔐 Database Backups and phpMyAdmin Access

To protect the MySQL database, we implemented automated backups using Kubernetes CronJobs. These backups were stored securely, with retention policies in place for recovery.

Additionally, we gave the client a secured phpMyAdmin interface, allowing them to manage and inspect database content with ease when needed—without compromising access control.

⏱️ Fixing WordPress Cron Issues the Right Way

WordPress’s built-in cron system is tied to page visits, which makes it unreliable under caching or high traffic. We disabled wp-cron.php and replaced it with a dedicated cron pod running on a Kubernetes CronJob schedule.

This approach ensured all scheduled tasks ran predictably and efficiently—without slowing down frontend performance or relying on visitor traffic.

🛡️ Security First: WAF, Bot Filtering, and Geo-Restrictions

With performance under control, we focused on security. We implemented a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect against common web threats like SQL injection and XSS attacks. To handle automated bot traffic, we deployed bot protection mechanisms and added geo-restrictions to block access from high-risk regions.

These measures drastically reduced the load from malicious traffic during peak campaigns and strengthened the overall security posture.

📈 Observability with the ELK Stack and Elastic APM

We introduced full observability by deploying the ELK Stack—Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana—for centralized logging. This allowed the team to search, filter, and analyze logs from all services in one place.

To complement this, we added the Elastic APM agent, which provided real-time traces and application performance metrics. This setup gave both developers and ops teams clear visibility into infrastructure health and user experience.

🧑‍💻 Developer Workflow & Change Management

To ensure safe and repeatable deployments, we implemented a GitOps-style workflow with GitHub. All WordPress code—including themes, plugins, and configuration—was version-controlled. A CI/CD pipeline handled automatic deployments to Kubernetes environments.

While media uploads remained in EFS for persistence, all other code changes were tracked in Git. This meant that every update was auditable, testable, and easily reversible—eliminating surprises and downtime.

✅ The Outcome

With the new infrastructure in place, the client’s WordPress site is now:

• Able to scale effortlessly to 50,000+ concurrent users
• More secure against real-time bot attacks and threats
• Fully observable with logs, metrics, and traces
• Backed by automated backups and controlled rollouts
• Operating at significantly lower monthly cost than before

"Our traffic went from 5k to 50k in under an hour and the new setup handled it like a breeze. Zero downtime, smooth performance, and peace of mind."
– Client CTO

📣 Ready to Scale Your Website?

Planning a high-traffic launch? Need to cut cloud costs without sacrificing performance? Want better observability and deployment control?

Let’s build infrastructure that grows with you.

📩 Reach out to us to scale your site—securely, reliably, and cost-effectively.