RightScale (see previous CloudAve coverage), one of the leading cloud management companies, and Zend (see previous CloudAve coverage) have announced a solution to deploy and manage business critical PHP applications in the cloud. In this era of open federated PaaS, pushed into prominence by VMware last week, this is RightScale’s way of jumping into the game. They are doing it with Zend targeting enterprises and by offering a pre-configured platform architecture that will easily onboard the enterprise PHP apps to the cloud.
The RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack combines their cloud management platform with Zend PHP platform to create a clustered PHP environment that can be easily deployed on the cloud. Some of the interesting features along with the usual RightScale advantages like auto scaling, monitoring, etc. are:
- Pre-configured architecture ready for speedy deployment
- 3-tier high availability architecture
- Freedom to choose any cloud provider
In the post Cloud Foundry era, portability of PaaS is one of the necessary conditions to avoid lock-in. RightScale is doing that with this announcement.
PHP is ubiquitous in the internet dominated world and enterprises like GE, AT&T, Bank of America (Nah, PHP is not the reason why Wikileaks got Bank of America documents 
), etc. are already using PHP. Ever since we (myself, James Urquhart and Geva Perry) did a podcast wondering who will be the PHP PaaS player, we have seen companies like PHPFog and Orchestra come up with PHP PaaS solutions. However, they are public cloud solutions and enterprises are not going to turn their attention on them anytime soon. RightScale clearly saw a gap in the enterprise space (however, I would like to point out Morphlabs’ approach to solve the problem here) and are jumping in with this offering.
As I have been arguing for a long time here at CloudAve, PaaS is the future of cloud services and we are going to see companies jump into the game with many different offerings. It is still too early to say who is going to gain traction and who is going to lose out. Let us see.
Related articles
- Zend and RightScale Launch Open PHP Platform (readwriteweb.com)
- Zend Launches Worldwide Center of Excellence Program (prnewswire.com)
- imabonehead: Cloud Foundry Architecture and Auto-Scaling ” RightScale Blog (rightscale.com)
- Lucas Carlson, Founder of Cloud-focused PHP Fog, Reveals What’s in His Stack (ostatic.com)
- Cloud Foundry Shakes Up the PaaS Scene (datacenterknowledge.com)
- VMWare Disrupts PaaS Space With Cloud Foundry – An Analysis (cloudave.com)