VMware + Zend Partnership: Goodbye Virtualization; Welcome Enterprise Cloud

In recent years popular opinion suggested that the private cloud delivered more immediate cloud monetization opportunities as opposed to the public cloud which would take more time. Instead we’ve witnessed faster adoption of public clouds with Amazon and Rackspace leading the pack. While the private cloud opportunity is huge there has been slow migration to private cloud due to difficulties in implementation and enterprise priorities.

The majority of Zend’s enterprise customers have virtualized their on-premise workloads, however, very few have true self-serve, elastic private clouds. What makes a virtualized environment a private cloud versus plain old virtualization? I am sure everyone has a different definition. My own definition includes the following requirements:

a) Self-service environments that automate both infrastructure and application provisioning.

b) Out-of-the-box application lifecycle management from development to test to production delivering best practices in a turnkey fashion.

c) Strong application-level management capabilities. The app is what matters most. Can you deploy, monitor, and identify root-cause without having to concern yourself about the underlying infrastructure?

d) Auto-scaling and optimizing your applications’ runtime footprint aka elasticity. Will the environment automatically scale-up and scale-down the app while retaining its integrity and ensuring fault-tolerance?

We designed and built Zend Server, our PHP cloud Application Platform, with these key tenets in mind. We created a fully automated PHP runtime environment that is fast, elastic and dependable. Zend Server automates application deployment, monitoring and root-cause analysis, delivers elasticity in conjunction with fault tolerance and much more. Our vision is to be the de-facto standard enterprise-grade PHP runtime for cloud. We are well on the path to getting there. We have proven integrations with Amazon’s Cloud via Amazon CloudFormation; native support for IBM private and public cloud environments; many clouds via our Rightscale partnership including Rackspace and Citrix; and several additional ones in the pipeline (which we’ll be talking about in the coming months). Our partners share a joint vision with us around cloud application platforms and we are excited to work with them to bring that vision to life.

On that note, I am excited to announce a new partnership with VMware. VMware today is no doubt a proven leader in enterprise virtualization. The company is making a strong effort to enable its virtualized customer base’s transition from virtualization to private cloud. One of the key components to making that transition happen is VMware’s vFabric Application Director product (App Director). App Director delivers a very simple and visual drag and drop approach to defining the application environment as reusable blueprints. We have partnered with VMware to create such blueprints for Zend Server in a way that truly delivers on some of the aforementioned must-have private cloud characteristics including self-serve provisioning, elasticity and application-level management.

vFabric Application Director configuring an elastic, highly available Zend Server environment:

Probably most exciting is that VMware recognizes that the enterprise is heterogeneous and many will have more than one kind of cloud to which they will want to deploy. As a result VMware has built App Director to not only support on-premise VMware environments as well as direct provisioning to VMware based service providers and also non-VMware based clouds such as Amazon. Yes, I believe VMware realizes that in order to be a credible cloud management vendor they need to be open and deliver choice of deployment to enterprise customers.

Now let’s go back to Zend Server. Zend Server does exactly that for PHP. We deliver choice of deployment in the cloud by delivering a consistent enterprise-grade PHP cloud application platform in multiple cloud environments across private and public clouds. Combine VMware’s multi-cloud provisioning and management with Zend Server’s multi-cloud support and a very compelling value-proposition for enterprise application development and operations teams emerges. It’s truly a write once, deploy anywhere application platform that is turnkey, elastic, fault tolerant and managed.

VMware and other Zend partners are making big investments in the private cloud. And while we are still at the beginning of enterprise customers implementing true private clouds we have heard from most of them that it’s where they want to be. It’s an exciting time to be in IT, and to be developing enterprise apps with PHP.

Goodbye virtualization. Welcome cloud!

ZendCon wrap-up and welcome phpcloud.com!

We just wrapped up the 7th ZendCon event last week in Santa Clara, and the enthusiasm of the PHP community was inspiring. PHP is gaining momentum across industries and geographies, powering the web, helping people build amazing apps with ease, proficiency and creativity. In so many ways, PHP is making a difference, from legacy modernization to mobile app development and cloud deployments. And PHP is the basis for Drupal CMS, Magento e-commerce, Joomla and Wordpress, platforms used by millions of people. It is gratifying to see the innovation in our community, which is now about 5 million developers strong, and Zend is proud to be part of it, with the introduction of phpcloud.com – which is like a triple play in the cloud.

First up is Zend Developer Cloud, a sandbox where PHP developers can get started and develop great apps with no need to build a PHP stack or spend time maintaining a PHP environment. They’re literally just a few clicks away from productive coding in Zend Developer Cloud. This represents a step function in improved productivity similar to what Web application frameworks delivered 6 years ago. Unlike many other cloud platform providers, Zend is clearly placing a major emphasis on development, which is where we believe successful cloud initiatives begin, and where customers are investing time and resources for the greatest benefit.

Here, developers can really work together in the cloud, creating containers and snapshots of their app stacks so others can join a project in progress, and collaborate productively. Troubleshooting and enabling the development of high quality code is also a major focus and the Zend Developer Cloud provides powerful tools such as our code tracing technology, and browser integration to deliver proactive alerts while developers are writing and testing code. We want to cater to all PHP developers, who may use everything from vim to Zend Studio. For those who use Zend Studio, we’ve integrated it with Zend Developer Cloud to make the developer experience seamless. Like other editors or IDEs? The open source Zend SDK will enable Eclipse PDT and other tools to be integrated with Zend Developer Cloud.

Next up is production, where the Zend Application Fabric provides an elastic, highly available platform with a complete stack — PHP runtime, a full range of extensions, and Zend Framework. Zend Application Fabric is powered by Zend Server to provide the PHP application monitoring and code tracing that developers have come to rely on. The ability to find and fix issues quickly without having to recreate them means that precious time once spent on troubleshooting can be refocused on coding. And third is a strong partner ecosystem. For developers who work in the Zend Developer Cloud, their code will be ready to deploy to any cloud that supports the Zend Application Fabric. This includes partnering with Amazon Web Services, Rightscale, Rackspace and IBM SmartCloud today, and more to come. And, developed apps can also be deployed on-premise with Zend Server to take full advantage of automated on-premise deployment and delivery benefits.

As we enter this new era of productivity and choice for Web developers, Zend will continue to innovate and build on a fully integrated and seamless development experience, delivering the best, elastic application platform and working with a strong partner ecosystem to deliver a cloud runtime environment where and when you want it.

Happy PHP’ing!!