The industry is going through a major reset as a result of Cloud Computing. Economies of scale, driven by public Cloud infrastructures in conjunction with pay-as-you-go pricing models, create a very strong motivating factor for companies to move more of their workloads into the Cloud. In addition, Cloud promises to deliver unprecedented agility and time-to-market which makes it all the more appealing.
Today, more than 35% of the Web workload runs on PHP (some believe it is closer to 55%). It is therefore not surprising that RightScale, the cloud management leader that powers the likes of Zynga, has reported that more than 37% of its customers are running PHP in the Cloud (PHP ranks as the #1 language among RightScale customers).
These synergies brought RightScale and Zend together in 2010, focused on delivering a best-of-breed PHP Cloud offering. At that time, we introduced the RightScale Zend Dev & Test Pack to enable PHP developers to get started quickly with a pilot project in the cloud. Today, we’re introducing the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack to deliver PHP for production in the Cloud.
We have aligned the development of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) with the needs of our existing and future customers, and defined key tenets for the Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform including:
- Multi-Cloud – We believe the market is looking for a consistent PHP application platform across multiple-cloud environments including public and private environments.
- Application Centricity – No matter what underlying resources are serving the application, the need for application-centric deployment and management is fundamental to how our customers want to run their workloads.
- Application Lifecycle – Achieving operational excellence and predictability requires strong consistency from development to testing to staging and production and a capable agile process to push new functionality into the market quickly.
- Portability – Cloud native applications should be fully portable across cloud infrastructures.
- Elasticity – Cloud platforms should automatically scale up and down, on-demand based on workload to ensure optimal user experience and help reduce infrastructure costs.
- Flexibility – Businesses have broadly varying workloads, business requirements and application preferences. We want to ensure users can customize their platform to fit their business needs.
RightScale’s experience in Cloud and Zend’s experience in PHP combine to deliver the most pragmatic and broadly applicable PHP platform that ensures success for customers who want to develop and deploy fault-tolerant, scalable and manageable PHP infrastructures in the Cloud.
The following are some examples of how we jointly address the above tenets with RightScale providing the infrastructure management capabilities and Zend focusing at the application development layer:
- Multi-cloud – RightScale is a multi-cloud management platform. While Amazon has been the focus, by year-end RightScale will, at minimum, have added support for the Rackspace Cloud and Cloud.com. Zend, in turn, will deliver a completely consistent PHP experience across these multiple Cloud environments.
- Portability – RightScale enables portability of infrastructure recipes and management such as load balancers, the Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform, database and other infrastructure components across multiple Cloud environments. Zend leads the Simple Cloud API project, which enables portability at the application level.
- Elasticity – RightScale has experience in monitoring and scaling-up applications that run on thousands of servers, including the provisioning and managing highly available infrastructure components. This tweet exemplifies how RightScale scaled-out a Web site to meet peak demand. Zend, too, has expertise in delivering scalable and highly-available fault-tolerant PHP environments for customers including NYSE Euronext, GE, BNP Paribas and others. Our platform supports scale up and down in the Cloud and addresses configuration, fault tolerance and other important aspects of elastic environments.
Through tight integration of RightScale and Zend technologies, with a click of a button, customers can launch highly-available virtual PHP infrastructures that include HA load balancing, HA MySQL and HA Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform (powered by 8 virtual servers). It is very cool stuff and really exemplifies the promise of cloud computing.
Our PaaS solution enables customers to ‘lift the hood’ and tweak the templates behind these infrastructures. For example, a development team may want to use Oracle in their cloud platform. They can easily use RightScale’s capabilities to add an Oracle setup to their template. This does not change the fact that a full infrastructure can be launched on the Cloud of their choice with the click of a button and it is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Need one of these setups for staging? Click a button to get an identical environment for staging. Deploy a new application version in staging, test, and if all is well, deploy to an identically configured production environment. Another click of the button and the staging environment goes away until a new one is needed. It’s cost-effective and agile PaaS, without compromising architectural and operational excellence. Exactly what businesses need when running critical applications in the Cloud.
At Zend we are very excited about Cloud Computing. We believe it is a game changer and by delivering an elastic, customizable PaaS built with architectural excellence and multi-cloud in mind, we are able to help our customers get the maximum benefit out of Cloud whether public or private.
The RightScale and Zend joint offering is production-ready, generally available and can be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis from both RightScale and Zend.
And this is just the beginning. We are working on several additions to the platform including robust application deployment (not far off) and other initiatives that will continue to accelerate onboarding and ensure operational excellence in production.
Thanks to our friends at RightScale who’ve done a phenomenal job in working with us to integrate and harden the platform. It’s been a pleasure!
Happy PHP’ing!
