Infrastructure

Additional layers of WPVIP’s infrastructure are in place to enhance the performance and security of your application environments.

The page cache

The page cache is the first layer of WPVIP’s infrastructure that is encountered by every request made to your WordPress or Node.js environment. The page cache determines whether a request will be served a cached response or if a request must be be routed to an origin server. The default behaviors of the page cache are designed to protect the health of your application by minimizing the number of requests made to your origin servers, while also ensuring that cached content is not stale.

The VIP File System

In a typical WordPress installation, uploaded media files are stored in a file system located within the site’s web container. On WPVIP, uploaded files are stored in a separate, external service called the VIP File System. All of the contents of a WordPress site’s /wp-content/uploads/ directory are mapped to the VIP File System.

Shared media files

As part of the “code moves up; content moves down” infrastructure, media files uploaded to a production environment are automatically shared by the VIP File System to its associated non-production environments. This eliminates the need to copy media between environments after a data sync and other similar operations.

Media file exports and imports

A copy of the media files associated with a WordPress environment and stored in the VIP File System can be exported from within the VIP Dashboard for an application.

Databases

Each environment in a WordPress application has its own unique SQL database instance. Direct access to an environment’s database is limited. The WP-CLI command wp db query is allowed, but defaults to read-only. A read-only phpMyAdmin console using VIP-CLI can be accessed if you have an Org admin role or an App admin role for the environments application.

Security

Some security and performance features are automatically implemented to protect and support your application. Security monitoring and firewalls are built in to the infrastructure, and all web containers run in read-only mode..

For WordPress applications, WPVIP has multiple security protections in place to protect against unauthorized access and abuse of the WP Cron, XML-RPC, and login endpoints.

The overall security of any application is not dependent on the infrastructure alone, but on the shared responsibility of all users with access to an application to follow security best practices, and to maintain the quality of the code that is deployed to their applications.