Pressing Matters at CERN: Our Experience Hosting WordPress in 2026
Rudraksh Pareek
Vasvi Sharma
14:45 - 15:30
Pavillon
In this session, we’ll present how we built a web-hosting platform at CERN using open-source cloud native technologies. This platform empowers CERN’s large scientific community to create and publish content on the internet with full sovereignty. We’ll begin with the fundamentals of deploying WordPress in a modern cloud-native context, addressing the distinct requirements of three user groups at CERN: creators, developers, and administrators. From there, we’ll share an analysis of the network traffic our websites receive - insights that enterprises hosting WordPress at this scale rarely disclose. We’ll explain how we built the platform to be resilient against this traffic by fine-tuning PHP-FPM, implementing multi-layer caching, load balancing, and eliminating other bottlenecks. Next, we’ll demonstrate how we integrate multiple tools from the open-source cloud-native ecosystem: a custom Golang operator we developed, OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution (OKD) as our Kubernetes platform, Helm and ArgoCD to power a GitOps pipeline that delivers continuous releases of both the operator and our customized WordPress distribution - all integrated with self-hosted Keycloak for SSO. Finally, we’ll walk through some of the operational patterns we’ve implemented on Kubernetes. This includes workflows for enforcing scheduled backups, automating routine tasks and ensuring proper RBAC across resources in a multi-tenant environment.