A look at serverless WordPress

These are the slides from a talk given at WordCamp Asia 2023.

Some of us love to manage servers. But for a lot of WordPress developers, servers are something we’d rather avoid. We’re happy to pay hosting providers, so we don’t have to worry about it.

WordPress hosting doesn’t remove all your hosting headaches. You still have to worry about scaling. You’re often overpaying for hosting because you have to worry about the worst-case scenario.

Well, that’s what serverless WordPress tries to solve. With serverless WordPress, you only pay for what you use. Meanwhile, you get an infrastructure that can scale from handling zero traffic to thousands in seconds.

This talk will go over serverless WordPress and how it works. You’ll learn how it differs from regular WordPress hosting with a traditional server setup and why it’s a game-changer for WooCommerce hosting. We’ll finish by going over tools and projects you can use to deploy your serverless WordPress site.

Transcript

1. A look at serverless WordPress
2. 2 Hi! 2 I’m Carl Alexander @twigpress carlalexander.ca
4. “Servers. Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them.” - WordPress developer (when a server blows up)
5. Server management
6. Still responsible
7. WordPress hosting
8. Still need to over provision
9. Serverless addresses these problems
10. 1 What Is Serverless?
11. “Are there really no servers with serverless!?” - Literally everyone I mention serverless to
13. Marketing term
14. Functions as a Service
15. On-demand computing
16. Upload code to a cloud provider
17. Code gets executed in response to an event
18. No mention of servers
19. Outside your sphere of concerns
20. 2How Does It Work?
21. WordPress on a server
23. Serverless WordPress is serverless PHP
24. How does PHP work on a web server?
26. How does serverless PHP compare?
27. Both run code in response to an event
28. So what’s different?
29. Not just PHP that runs without a server
30. Everything is serverless
31. Service based architecture
33. PHP runtime?
34. Unique element of serverless PHP
35. What does it do?
36. Processes lambda event
37. Figures out what the event wants
38. Sends a result back (HTTP response)
39. Mimics a web server
40. Request a file, returns a file
41. Creates FastCGI request, sends it to PHP-FPM
42. Also manages the PHP-FPM process
43. Only one PHP-FPM worker
44. Lambda only handles one event at a time
45. Serverless WordPress architecture
47. 3Advantages of serverless
49. No servers to manage
50. Not everyone is comfortable with servers
51. Still responsible
52. WordPress hosting solves this issue
53. New problem. Scaling.
54. WordPress hosting is single server
55. Each Lambda function is a PHP worker
57. Scaling in seconds not minutes
59. Need to plan for the worst with servers
60. How much would that cost?
61. None of that with serverless
62. Usage based pricing
63. Pay when your workers run
64. Charged by the millisecond
65. 4Drawbacks of Serverless
67. Less predictable cost
68. Paying for a server feels safe
69. $X/month
70. Need more performance? Pay more!
72. How many requests? Average duration?
73. Stressful and harder to budget for
74. Costs less
75. AWS lock-in
77. Why not Azure or GCP?
78. Not interchangeable
79. Not just Lambda
80. Need other services
81. Equivalent ≠ Same
82. Energy with AWS
83. WordPress assumes you’re on a server
84. Can’t install themes and plugins directly
85. Media library
86. WordPress plugins assume it too
87. Potential compatibility issues
88. 5Evaluating Serverless
89. Tempting to only compare cost
90. “Serverless is expensive. I could just get a $5/month droplet from DigitalOcean.” - Someone comfortable with servers
91. Dishonest
92. Intangible costs
93. Mental health
94. Your time
95. 6Tools and Projects
97. Serverless WordPress is open source
98. github.com/ymirapp
99. Need to fund development
100. 100 7 Ymir https://ymirapp.com/open
101. GitHub sponsor (github.com/carlalexander)
102. 7Future of Hosting
103. Would you buy a physical server?
104. You get one in the cloud!
105. Next step
106. Serverless is deploy and forget
107. Levels playing field
108. What would you build?
109. ?Questions
110. 110 Thank you! 2 @twigpress carlalexander.ca blog.ymirapp.com