There is a lot of scoffing in this thread and I agree AWS does make some things overly complicated but I think the scoffing here is unfair because the architecture looks far more complicated than it actually is.
First of all, lets bare in mind this is talking about larger, enterprisey installs. So what would you need if you hosted on-prem:
- a DB with a read replica in case your main DB died (RDS can actually build read replicas for you pretty easily so this part of the deployment would be much easier than doing the same MySQL replication config on-prem)
- Redis for caching (my experience with WP is a couple of years out of date now but when I last managed an highly popular WP install (several in fact) Redis or Memcached caching was a necessity to get the kind of page load times our visitors expected)
- Shared storage (bare in mind you're running more than one WP web server - if this was on prem you'd be hosting those files off a SAN)
- A load balancer (I don't think I need to explain a justification for that one)
- And probably a CDN too (reduce the stress on your web-servers and internet gateway)
That's literally the bare minimum any large Wordpress application would need and that's all that AWS architecture is outlying. Sure there's a few more items on there like NAT gateways but those are just network stacks that are deployed as part of your VPC (or in on-prem terms, that's just the VLAN and/or subnet management that you'd assign to your load balancer).
If you don't need multiple web-servers nor high availability then your architecture becomes drastically simpler (no load balancer, no shared storage, no replica DB, etc) but also you would run the risk of downtime and even data loss. Which might not be an issue for some people but it's also not one of the selling points of AWS. So you'd be better off with shared hosting or a managed WP service -- or to put it another way, AWS was never going to be a good fit.
edit: Personally I think the issue here is more WP -- or rather the classical CMS design -- than it is AWS. A static site generator style of CMS would be a lot simpler cloud design and run a lot cheaper too. WP is designed from an era when web shops had this infrastructure set up by default.
First of all, lets bare in mind this is talking about larger, enterprisey installs. So what would you need if you hosted on-prem:
- a DB with a read replica in case your main DB died (RDS can actually build read replicas for you pretty easily so this part of the deployment would be much easier than doing the same MySQL replication config on-prem)
- Redis for caching (my experience with WP is a couple of years out of date now but when I last managed an highly popular WP install (several in fact) Redis or Memcached caching was a necessity to get the kind of page load times our visitors expected)
- Shared storage (bare in mind you're running more than one WP web server - if this was on prem you'd be hosting those files off a SAN)
- A load balancer (I don't think I need to explain a justification for that one)
- And probably a CDN too (reduce the stress on your web-servers and internet gateway)
That's literally the bare minimum any large Wordpress application would need and that's all that AWS architecture is outlying. Sure there's a few more items on there like NAT gateways but those are just network stacks that are deployed as part of your VPC (or in on-prem terms, that's just the VLAN and/or subnet management that you'd assign to your load balancer).
If you don't need multiple web-servers nor high availability then your architecture becomes drastically simpler (no load balancer, no shared storage, no replica DB, etc) but also you would run the risk of downtime and even data loss. Which might not be an issue for some people but it's also not one of the selling points of AWS. So you'd be better off with shared hosting or a managed WP service -- or to put it another way, AWS was never going to be a good fit.
edit: Personally I think the issue here is more WP -- or rather the classical CMS design -- than it is AWS. A static site generator style of CMS would be a lot simpler cloud design and run a lot cheaper too. WP is designed from an era when web shops had this infrastructure set up by default.