Network High Availability and WAF for WordPress

Network High Availability and WAF for WordPress means making sure your WordPress website is always up and running smoothly.

Table of Contents

• What does High Availability (HA) mean?
• What is a WAF?
• Why do I need a redundant network ?
• How does it work?
  • • Main wetopi HA redundant components:
  • What does the load balancer do?
  • How do i enable High Availability for my WordPress site?

What does High Availability (HA) mean?

High availability refers to systems that are durable and likely to operate continuously without failure for a long time. The term implies that parts of a system have been fully tested and that there are accommodations for failure in the form of redundant components.

What is a WAF?

A web application firewall (or WAF) filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web application. A WAF is differentiated from a regular firewall in that a WAF is able to filter the content of specific web applications while regular firewalls serve as a safety gate between servers. By inspecting HTTP traffic, it can prevent attacks stemming from web application security flaws, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and security misconfigurations.

Vulnerability	Protection Provided
Data injection from untrusted source	Identify and block requests that contain untrusted data or code
Invalid authentication	Protect against exploitation
Cross site scripting	Protection against malicious code entry
Incorrect access control	Enforced access control
Misconfiguration	Protection from misconfiguration
Exposed Data	Protection against leaked information
Attack Protection	Secondary layer protection
Cross site forgery	Protection against forged request

Why do I need a redundant network ?

To Increase the High Availability (HA) of your WordPress servers.

Wetopi now has a second line of Load Balancers and Web Application Firewalls with its own new IP address. For those who doesn’t know what is WAF Balancers and HA, keep reading the post, you will get an idea in a little while 🙂

How does it work?

By pointing your site to two IP addresses, Your WordPress site will have dual traffic routes.

1. When you type an URL in the web browser
2. The web browser queries the DNS requesting for the resolution of our domain.
3. The DNS, in our case, will respond with 2 IP addresses. Meaning: yes this domain has two points of access, two possible routes.
4. The browser then stores the two wetopi IP addresses. (check your chrome DNS cache here: chrome://net-internals/#dns or learn more in this crash course in net internals).
5. Browser opens a pool of connections using alternatively both addresses to serve content.

The benefits are;

When one route fails, the browser removes the IP address from the connection pool and your site will be available continuously without any connection disruption.

Main wetopi HA redundant components:

1. Double IP address on each POA (Point Of Access)
2. Double Load Balancer per network route.
3. Double WAF reverse proxies per network route.
4. WordPress CVMs (Containerized Virtual Machines) run on a cluster of nodes.
5. Manager nodes in charge of CVMs orchestration: 4 per cluster. Manager nodes are responsible for maintaining your WordPress server alive. If your server fails, the manager moves it to an active node.
6. SSD Storage: replica 3. Each file is stored three times to ensure your files are safe when we have Storage hardware failures.

What does the load balancer do?

A load balancer is a device that distributes web traffic across multiple back end servers in order to improve website response time and provide redundancy.

How do i enable High Availability for my WordPress site?

You need to update your Domain DNS record to enable High Availability for your WordPress site.

Go to your wetopi panel → select your site→ click the “Domain DNS config”.

There, you will find the IP addresses that you need to add to your DNS server for enabling High Availability for your website.

For your reference, you may view this video:

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