I have a client with a popular Wordpress blog that experiences occasional short-term traffic spikes (when the site is promoted on national TV). The blog is already hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance, and we're exploring using Amazon's load balancer to help with the spikes.
Two general "big picture" questions about this:
To set this up, would I just create a machine image (AMI) from the existing server, and then duplicate it into a new instance, and tell the load balancer to split the traffic between the two instances? (Or more than two, I suppose...)
When my client needs to edit the content on the blog, it seems like I would need a way to point them to one particular "master" instance so they could use the WordPress admin tool on that server, and then copy (rsync) the content from that instance to the other instances, so everyone has the same data. Is this the right approach?
Any other tips/suggestions would be much appreciated. I'm new to Amazon's load balancer so I'm just trying to wrap my head around the big picture before I dive into specifics.
UPDATE: some static content lives on Amazon CloudFront CDN. I wasn't familiar with APC but I'm looking into it now (thank you). WP-SuperCache is next on the list to implement. I believe the database is on a separate server instance.
Thank you, Eric