Build a cloud-native extension for WordPress

Cloud-native application development is now a hot topic in the industry. Developers want to use modern languages, write microservices or even serverless functions. They expect high scalability with modern monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana. Kubernetes and CNCF landscape projects are no longer perceived as hype for early adopters. This is the mainstream now.

If you start a new, green field project you are lucky — you can dive into the great variety of tools and frameworks and use them. But how to pick the right tools? At the moment of writing this post, there are 686 projects registered in the CNCF landscape.

We also have the less lucky developers who still have to deal with applications designed when monoliths were cool. What about them? Can they benefit from cloud-native patterns? Yes, they can!

Imagine your legacy application

You probably have some applications you have to extend or integrate with but you are not happy with that fact. There can be a few reasons for it:

• It requires writing code in the language you don’t know and you want to use only Golang or JavaScript.
• It is possible to add a new feature to the application but it requires a complex redeployment process which is risky.
• You just don’t want to touch it because it is fragile and adding anything can make it unstable.
• You want to write an extension which can be scaled independently of the application.

WordPress as an example

I prepared some example to help your imagination. The simple scenario with WordPress as a legacy application. Imagine you are running some commerce site and you created a blog on WordPress showing product reviews and tests. Now you want to engage your customers and you enabled comments in your blog posts. Users should see their comments immediately published, but you don’t have time to moderate the content. The idea is to publish only positive comments automatically, and put other comments on hold.

You could use WordPress hook comment_post and implement a plugin in PHP. But it won't work for me. I don't know PHP, and my team mates don't either. I would like to use external systems (text analytics, slack, maybe more in the future), and I don't want to deal with secrets and authorization flows in WordPress side. Additionally, I want to utilize all modern DevOps practices and patterns, like 12 Factor App. In other words: me and my team want to do cool, cloud native stuff on top of Kubernetes, instead of be WordPress maintainers.

Of course, in this simple scenario microservices, Kubernetes, Service Mesh, and other tools would be overkill but the real-world use cases are more complex, and you can imagine how this initial flow can grow in the future.

Implementation plan

Let’s implement and deploy our example. I will use:

• A Kubernetes cluster from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to deploy both WordPress and my code
• Knative eventing and NATS as a messaging middleware to decouple WordPress from my extension
• Istio Service Mesh together with Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger to have monitoring and tracing
• Kubeless as a serverless engine for my code
• Grafana and Loki to manage logs
• Service Catalog, WordPress Connector for Kyma and Kyma Application Broker to bind WordPress API and Events to my code

Installation

Based on the above list, you can expect a long installation process but I will use a Kyma operator that will do everything for me. All you need is a Google account and a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project. If you don’t have it yet, create one and Google will give a 12-month free trial with $300 credit to run your cluster.

Prepare the GKE cluster with Kyma

Follow the installation guide for GKE or just execute the following commands, replacing placeholders with proper values:

Access Kyma

NOTE: Follow steps in this section only if you installed Kyma from the instructions in this blog post. If you followed the official Kyma documentation, skip this section as the installation steps cover adding a self-signed certificate and accessing the cluster.

The simple installation guide we followed uses a self-signed certificate and an xip.io domain. Such a certificate will be rejected by your browser so you have to set it as trusted.

Run these commands to display the Console URL, login, and password:

You should get a similar result:

You can now open the Kyma Console URL in the browser and log in with the provided credentials.

WordPress installation

If you already have WordPress installed, you can go to the next step. If not, you can easily deploy WordPress with a few commands:

Wait a few seconds for WordPress to start. You can check the status in the Deployments section.

When the status of all deployments is RUNNING, navigate to https://wordpress.1.2.3.4.xip.io replacing the 1.2.3.4 IP with the one for your cluster. Then complete the installation wizard.

Kyma plugin for WordPress

Before you install plugins, ensure that you have the proper configuration of Permalinks. Log into WordPress as an admin, go to Settings -> Permalinks, select the Post name option and save your changes. Download the following plugins:

• Basic Auth — for more details go to this GitHub repository
• Kyma Connector — for more details go to this GitHub repository In the left navigation, go to Plugins -> Add New -> Upload Plugin. Choose the Basic Auth and Kyma Connector plugins from your disk to install and activate them. Go to Settings -> Kyma Connector, uncheck the Verify SSL option (you need it because the default Kyma installation uses self-signed certificates), provide the username and password you created during the installation, and save your changes.

Connect WordPress to Kyma

In this step you establish a trusted connection between the WordPress instance and your Kyma cluster, both hosted on the same Kubernetes cluster. You also register WordPress API and WordPress Events in the Service Catalog and enable both in a selected Namespace.

In the Kyma Console navigate back to the home page, go to Applications, and create a new Application called wordpress.

Open it and press Connect Application. Copy the connection token URL to the clipboard. Go to the Kyma Connector Settings in WordPress, paste the token URL in the Kyma Connection field, and press Connect. You should see the success message in WordPress and a new entry inside the Provided Services & Events section of the wordpress Application in Kyma.

Diasable SSL for Kyma->WordPress

WordPress installed in a cluster uses a self-signed SSL certificate. Kyma default settings don’t allow for such a connection. You need to explicitly turn it on:

1. Edit the wordpress-application-gateway Deployment in the kyma-integration Namespace. Run:

1. Edit the Deployment in Vim. Select i to start editing.
2. Find the skipVerify parameter and change its value to true.
3. Press ESC, type :wq, and click ENTER to write and quit.

One command to do it:

CAUTION: The command assumes that skipVerify is the argument with the index 6 (0-based).

Enable WordPress Events and APIs in the default Namespace

The Kyma Application connectivity can expose APIs and Events (Async API) of Applications in the Service Catalog. To show WordPress in the Service Catalog, first, you need to bind the Application to a selected Namespace. Go to Applications, select the wordpress Application, press Create Binding and select the default Namespace. Now go to the default Namespace and open the Catalog - you should see WordPress API in the Services tab. Open it and have a look at API console and Events specification. We will react on comment.post.v1 event and interact with /wp/v2/comments/{id} API. To make them available in the default Namespace click the Add once button and create an instance of the WordPress Service Class. Behind the scenes, the Application Connector creates the Application Gateway (a kind of proxy) that forwards requests from bounded services or functions to the WordPress instance.

Write your code

You did the wiring, so let’s write some code. In the default Namespace create a new lambda named review and paste the following code in the Settings & Code editor:

In the Dependencies section, add:

Press Select Function Trigger, choose your function which is the comment.post Event, and save the function. The trigger is available because you have the WordPress service instance in the default Namespace.

Binding

Go to Instances under the Service Management, open the WordPress instance in the Services tab. Click Bind Application, select review function, set the Prefix namespace value to WP_, and confirm.

You can now open the review lambda again and check if there is a new entry in Service Bindings section with WP_GATEWAY_URL environment variable.

Test it

Go to WordPress main site and open the Hello World! blog post. Add the following 2 comments under the blog post:

• I love it!
• I hate it! Go to the WordPress Dashboard and check the comments. You should see that both comments have a score footer with the following sentiment values:
• 1 for a positive comment
• -1 for a negative comment The negative comment is waiting for moderation.

Explore the benefits

Your code runs using Istio Service Mesh with network secured by mutual TLS. You can see the metrics of your functions, such as latency, responses, errors and memory usage, with one click on Grafana Dashboard. You can trace your requests using Jaeger. And you can scale your functions independently from WordPress.

Summary

Why should you try Kyma? If you start a new project on Kubernetes, you will get carefully selected and best tools from the Cloud Native Landscape, which are already configured and integrated. If you want to move only a part of your project to the cloud and you have to keep legacy applications around, Kyma will help you to build extensions for them using modern tools on top of Kubernetes. Also when you start a new project with a goal that the final solution should be extendable and customizable, considering Kyma to address these challenges from day one would offer benefits. Please remember that Kyma is an open-source project which is actively developed (~80 contributors and ~600 GitHub stars) with the support from such a big company as SAP.

Next steps

In the next blog post, I will show you how to use services from cloud providers using the Open Service Broker API.

Originally published at https://kyma-project.io/blog/2019/7/8/extend-wordpress/ by Piotr Bochynski