Yes, you can do this. But, what about a staging environment? How do you keep data and code in sync between environments? My company runs a lot of wordpress inst

Yes, you can do this. But, what about a staging environment? How do you keep data and code in sync between environments? My company runs a lot of wordpress instances, and we've wound up shipping most of them to Pantheon. (pantheon.io) Not only does it take care of environment issues, but it gives you redis and implements caching as a service. As the post says, wordpress fights AWS a bit. We leave it to the people who are experts at winning that fight. (I know this reads like an ad. I'm not affiliated with pantheon except as a user. Pantheon comes close to making wordpress not suck.)