Zend builds a pick-your-partner PHP cloud platform
Zend Technologies took the wraps off a new cloud service for developing and deploying software developed in the PHP web server-side scripting language on Tuesday at the ZendCon conference in Santa Clara, CA. Called phpcloud.com, the service lets developers rapidly build applications based on a number of frameworks and then deploy them into production.
While languages like Ruby may have become the popular kid as of late, PHP is still the leading web technology in terms of the raw number of deployments, with over 20 million domains using the Apache PHP module alone. A number of PHP-based platform-as-a-service providers are already out there, including PHP Fog , Red Hat's OpenShift, and Orchestra (recently acquired by Ruby-on-Rails PaaS provider Engine Yard). But unlike some “platform-as-a-service” plays, Zend's allows developers to pick the infrastructure provider for deployment—a public or private cloud, or an in-house Zend Server system.
The core of phpcloud.com is the Zend Application Fabric. This is a set of resources based on Zend Server that automates many of the tasks associated with configuring and managing virtual server workloads in a cloud environment, including the auto-scaling of resources to handle surges in application usage. Server instances within the fabric are set up as PHP runtime “containers”.
