Best Kubernetes storage option

Question

I know there are several options, I’ve heard everything from SSHFS, NFS, object storage all the way to storage OS, my issue is I need something fast and reliable to serve a media website built on Wordpress or similar cms. However I may want to do something with django also.

I have a home server I’ve been using over sshfs for some things but for a media site I don’t think that would be fast enough.

Any suggestions on the best method to store things? I also need to be able to access these items on an as needed basis through SFTP or an interface. I’ve heard more than once that storageOS is the best option but after reviewing their site I don’t understand how it is persistent storage if it’s a container that is stored on an inaccessible node.

How can you back that up, manage space, etc?

I’m sure that a lot of you were looking at this question laughing because it seems so silly. Then there are probably some people who are just learning and saying OK yeah this is a legitimate question and then there are probably some people newer than myself you don’t even realize they need storage yet.

Answer 1

Your question is not silly at all, indeed managing WordPress at scale requires broad knowledges due to how WordPress is implemented.

It's good to know that WordPress consists of 1) core PHP code, 2) plugins/themes and 3) uploaded media assets. To serve the core and plugins, you'll need to locate the code either in local disk or NFS. Local disk is obviously faster since it doesn't interact with network, but NFS is a good choice if you want to have multiple servers to share the same code.

The uploaded media assets are a bit different. The most common "assets" are image files, and you can completely offload the server traffic to object storage such as AWS S3 or GCP Cloud Storage. Unlike plugins and themes, the media assets are static meaning it will never run server-side logics like PHP.

Moreover, WordPress is read-heavy application that most of the MySQL query is to render blog posts to your public audiences, means any-sized server may blow up when unexpected number of visitors rush to your website. This is where CDN shines, to cache rendered HTMLs in the edge servers at the first visit, then serve the cached files without reaching to origins. AWS CloudFront and GCP Cloud CDN are popular CDNs to turn cheap WordPress server to globally-scalable media site.

So, I recommend to have the following architecture:

Visitor --> CDN --> Web/PHP Server --> MySQL

When configured correctly, you can serve millions of traffics backed with $10 web server.