WordPress DevOps team

I mean…

Imagine the time and effort required to maintain a large WordPress site, eCommerce or blog. It can be a task that will consume several minutes even hours per day, and the more your site increases, the more time you will spend optimizing it and managing it for a large number of users.

So what happens with small sites that suddenly got thousands of traffic? Is that little blog prepared to scale that much?

Or, if you created a WordPress multisite monster with more than hundreds of installations?

Sounds hard right?

As I said before I have the answer to all of this questions in this blog, so continue reading to know how to apply modern DevOps practices to ensure your WordPress site will run smoothly and applying development best practices by enabling a staging-testing-production life cycle for any WordPress application that is very common nowadays.

The word “DevOps” is currently used to refer to a practice where the combination of 2 teams, Development and Operations, increases the agility to deliver applications and services faster for any given organization, business or startup.

One DevOps related task is dealing with the constant updates to any application and this does not exclude WordPress, since it is always updating its functionalities, security, plugins, themes, etc.

So how will you manage that large site? Well, this will become a task for your DevOps team where they need to keep the pace to update, maintain, secure and administrate your application and its environment.

Check out the latest DevOps Trends with our blog.

Well, the term DevOps is relatively new, but with WordPress, we can define it as “Continuous Delivery” of new features and updates ensuring 99.99% of availability and 0 downtimes or disruption.

You may be wondering:

Is it that difficult?

Well, considering it is not a typical site, multisite or WooCommerce store…  IT IS.

It takes a lot of planning and effort to provide the desired update to the system, considering multiple servers are running, numerous databases and database servers, etc. There you will need a DevOps team to ensure your update runs smoothly and your customers do not get affected by any deploy.

Let’s not forget the quarterly updates for WordPress, vulnerability patches and core functionalities update, the requirements from your company regarding development, DevOps methodology and its technologies are a must for your application.

What is the duty of a DevOps WordPress team?

Pretty much the DevOps WordPress Team would be in charge of managing, updating, secure and maintain your Infrastructure and Code releases.

• Version control

Have an active version control system to manage and collaborate for any kind of feature implementation as well as bug fixes, deploying, etc. It will also work as a version repository in case the team needs a backup.

• Site maintenance

Ensure the correct functionality of the site as well as health status for all its services.

• Continuous Delivery

Streamline, build and release processes with continuous integration and testing in any CI tool and Continuous Delivery with Jenkins, CircleCi or AWS Code pipeline and AWS Codedeploy.

• Risk Management

All the management to decrease the impact due to any uncertain event to the WordPress application and its IT environment.

• Backups and Disaster Recovery

Have a solution in place to restore the WordPress files as well as all the user’s data for any contingency that could happen. (e.g., Physical disaster, Hacking, etc.)

Before hiring someone or a DevOps Specialist, you should consider asking your team for their needs and the application needs. There are multiple factors that could influence your team needs and decisions for WordPress DevOps like:

• WordPress Core Updates
• WordPress Theme Updates
• WordPress Plugin Updates
• WordPress Maintenance
• WordPress Optimization
• WordPress Security
• WordPress Monitoring
• Provide WordPress Insights

The first three, I am sure can handle by your Dev Team, but the Ops team can provide a better approach for the following five. Your team needs to get silo-ed out and start collaborating to bring ideas, projects, and features faster to live.

The better answer here is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Since it offers many services that can make your developers work easier and the operations faster.

Spinning up a cloud environment with CI/CD with all the resources you need can be a really simple task that could be automated in AWS.

Amazon Web Services hosts a lot of WordPress Websites around the world and also provides useful DevOps tools to help you to automate everything.

How to measure your WordPress DevOps team efficiency

You can congratulate your team whenever you reach a high stability, availability and have happy customers.

Here are some metrics you can evaluate:

• When you do not have down times (Downtimes)
• When your systems are not slow (Loading Speed)
• When you are continually receiving updates as requested (Stay-up-to date)
• When customers are happy (Customer Satisfaction)
• When you are not worrying about Infrastructure (DevOps reliability)