In this article I am going to show you how to install Wordpress with MySQL Database inside Multi Node Kubernetes k8s cluster on AWS using Ansible.

Pravat kumar Nath sharma

9 min readSep 28, 2021

Let’s Start

Brief Introduction to All the technologies used here

What is Wordpress ?

what is wordpress

WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog.

In fact, WordPress powers over 40.0% of all the websites on the Internet. Yes more than one in four websites that you visit are likely powered by WordPress.

Wordpress is a CMS (content management system)

A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website like content without needing to know anything about programming.

For example, not only does WordPress power a huge number of business sites and blogs, it’s also the most popular way to create an eCommerce store as well! With WordPress, you can create:

Business websites
eCommerce stores
Blogs
Portfolios
Resumes
Forums
Social networks
Membership sites

What is MySQL ?

what is mysql

MySQL is the most popular Open Source Relational SQL Database Management System. MySQL is one of the best RDBMS being used for developing various web-based software applications

MySQL is used by many database-driven web applications, including Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and WordPress.

What is Kubernetes ?

What is Kubernetes ?

Kubernetes commonly stylized as K8s is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management.

It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
It aims to provide a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”
It works with a range of container tools and runs containers in a cluster, often with images built using Docker.
Kubernetes originally interfaced with the Docker runtime through a “Dockershim”

What is Multi Node Kubernetes Cluster ?

multi node kubernetes cluster

A Kubernetes cluster is a set of node machines for running containerized applications. If you’re running Kubernetes, you’re running a cluster. At a minimum, a cluster contains a control plane and one or more compute machines, or nodes. Nodes actually run the applications and workloads.

Multi Node Kubernetes Cluster is a Group of nodes in which there is one Master Node and Multiple Worker/Slave Nodes.

What is AWS Cloud ?

what is aws

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.

These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools.
One of these services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet.
AWS’s version of virtual computers emulates most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware:

central processing units (CPUs)
graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing
local/RAM memory
hard-disk/SSD storage
a choice of operating systems
networking
pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

What is Ansible ?

what is ansible

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning.

Benefits of Using Ansible

Free: Ansible is an open-source tool.
Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks later).
Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.
Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.
Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.
Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server

Prerequisite

Your Preferred Choice of OS (I am using Redhat 8)
Ansible Installed
AWS account

Step to Follow:

📌 Automate Kubernetes Cluster Using Ansible

🔅 Launch ec2-instances on AWS Cloud eg. for master and slave.

🔅 Create roles that will configure master node and slave node seperately.

🔅 Launch a wordpress and mysql database connected to it in the respectine slaves.

🔅 Expose the wordpress pod and client able hit the wordpress ip with its respective port.

Note: You will get all the code and files on my github profile I have given the github link below at the end of this article.

Step 1:

Creating Ansible Playbook for Launching AWS EC2 instance.

Ansible Playbook for launching Ec2 instances

I have written this Playbook to launch EC2 instance. This Playbook will launch 3 EC2 Instances for Kubernetes Cluster one Master Node and two Worker Node.

3 ec2 instances Launched Successfully

master_node IP
13.212.210.46
worker_node IP
13.229.54.140
13.212.239.24

Step 2:

Create Playbook to configure k8s Master and k8s Worker Nodes on the above created EC2 Instances using kubeadm.

Master Node Playbook:

First of All I have written a Playbook that will configure k8s Master Node in Aws Master Ec2 Instance.

Ansible Playbook for master node

Ansible Playbook for master node

Ansible Playbook for master node

This playbook will:

Install docker inside Master Node EC2 instance
Configure YUM to install Kubelet, Kubeadm, Kubectl
Enable all the services of docker and kubernetes
Initialize Kubeadm services
Install flannel

(Flannel is a simple, lightweight layer 3 fabric for Kubernetes. Flannel manages an IPv4 network between multiple nodes in a cluster. It does not control how containers are networked to the host, only how the traffic is transported between hosts)

Create Join command for workers/slave to join the cluster with master

Worker/Slave Node:

Now I have written Worker/Slave Node Playbook to configure Slave Node inside Worker Ec2 instances.

Ansible Playbook for slave node

Ansible Playbook for slave node

This playbook will:

Install docker inside Master Node EC2 instance
Configure YUM to install Kubelet, Kubeadm, Kubectl
Enable all the services of docker and kubernetes
Initialize Kubeadm services
Install flannel
Restart All the services again
Fetching Join command to join the cluster

Step 3:

Convert Playbook into roles and Upload those role on your Ansible Galaxy repo.

Now I have created Ansible Roles Named Slave_node and Master_node to make it more organized.

and put all the files and playbook inside these roles required to setup kubernetes cluster.

code to create ansible roles for salve node

code to create ansible roles for master node

Step 4:

This is ansible Configuration file ansible.cfg you need to have privilege escalation for AWS EC2 instances to setup with ansible playbook.

For more Info about this you can read my another Article

Configure Webserver on AWS ec2 using Ansible

Hello Everyone

moizalimoomin.medium.com

ansible.cfg file for ansible to setup ec2 instances on aws

Now Its Time To Test All the Codes That We have Written:

First We have to Launch EC2 instances in AWS

Use this command:

ansible-playbook ec2.yml

ec2.yml ansible playbook

Aws ec2 dashboard

You will get all the IP Address of EC2 instances in Ansible Host Inventory using AWS python script for Dynamic Inventory

ansible inventory file with ip address

If you want to get all the IP address of EC2 instances created above dynamically to the Ansible inventory file than use this Python scripts given below.