Newspaper on WordPress

A regional newspaper runs its website on WordPress, with themes and plugins it cannot rewrite. Traffic doubles whenever a big story breaks, so the site has to run on several web servers that are added and removed automatically, spread across two Availability Zones so that losing one does not take the paper offline. Editors upload photos through WordPress, and every web server must see the same uploads and plugin files the moment they are saved, because WordPress writes them to a local folder. The MySQL database should fail over automatically without anyone restoring a backup, and article pages and images should be cached close to readers.