Cloud WP: WordPress from Git on AKS

WordPress hosting without the per-site subscription treadmill. Managed WordPress hosts charge per site and per visitor, and your platform team still ends up maintaining a separate snowflake stack outside Kubernetes. Cloud WP runs every WordPress property in the AKS cluster you already operate: declare each site as a ten-line Kubernetes resource, and the operator deploys it straight from your git repository - autoscaled, stateless, and managed like the rest of your platform. You pay for the control plane, not your workloads: about $30 per month per cluster, billed through the Azure subscription you already have. Unlimited sites, unlimited branch previews, no visitor counts, no per-site fees - your sites, pods and databases are never metered, whether MySQL runs in-cluster or in Azure Database for MySQL. If you are leaving a managed WordPress host: the monthly software fee here is what a single site costs there, and it covers your entire portfolio.

How it works

• Git is the source of truth. Point a site at a GitHub repository and branch; pods clone at boot, and when the branch moves the operator rolls the site to the new commit. A GitHub webhook makes deploys immediate, with polling as the fallback. An optional .stateless/site.yaml in the repository carries the site tuning (replicas, cache, PHP settings) with the code it belongs to.
• Branch preview environments - free. Push a branch and the operator spins up a full preview site with its own database schema - one branch, one environment, exactly how staging should work. Previews carry no software fee at all. Delete the branch and the preview is swept away.
• Stateless by design. Web pods are disposable: code from git, configuration from the environment, media offloaded to object storage. Autoscaling, rolling deploys and node failures stop being scary.
• Batteries included. Per-site MySQL for evaluation or bring your managed database (Azure Database for MySQL), per-site memcached object cache, external WP-cron, generated credentials and salts, and a friendly in-cluster dashboard for the web team - no kubectl required.
• One-field public exposure. Flip spec.expose and the site gets an Azure public IP and a managed cloudapp.azure.com hostname; bring your own domain and gateway when you are ready.

Good fit if

• You run many WordPress properties - a university, a multi-brand company, a media group, an agency with enterprise clients - and per-site managed-hosting invoices have become a real line item.
• Your platform team standardized on Kubernetes and wants WordPress to stop being the exception.
• You need your sites, data and deploy pipeline to stay inside your own tenant and region.

Prerequisites

• An AKS cluster.
• A GitHub repository per site (public or private; a fresh vanilla install is also supported for evaluation).

WordPress is a registered trademark of the WordPress Foundation. Cloud WP is an independent product for WordPress and is not endorsed by or affiliated with the WordPress Foundation or Automattic.