WordPress.com Powered by Amazon S3, Varnish, and Pound

Have you ever wondered how the efficient servers of wordpress.com handle millions of requests per day? Information is being revealed about how Amazon S3, Varnish, and Pound work in the background to bring your the WordPress.com efficiency.

Matt explains that wordpress.com is now using Amazon S3 as the primary storage, rather than just for backups. They have ‘some front layers’ of Varnish, so the majority of the serving doesn’t hit Amazon S3 servers. And there bills are now rising to $1500/mo and more.

Here is a more detailed review of how they manage serving files from Amazons S3 service at WordPress.com. They explain how a request comes into Pound for a file which determines which of several backend servers the request should hit. And then the request comes into varnish on the backend servers and so on…

GLOSSARY -
- Pound program is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web servers.
- Varnish is a high-performance HTTP accelerator targeted primarily at the FreeBSD 6 and Linux 2.6 platforms
- Amazon S3 is a storage service for the Internet, designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Have you hosted on Amazon S3?