• "PHP in the Cloud" By Frédéric Harper
• "Develop your Agile mindset" By Steffan Surdek
• "Database Indexing part 2" By Cory Isaacson
• "Presenting For Geeks eBook teaser" By Dirk Haun
• "Level Crossings and Traffic Jams" By Stefan Priebsch

As always, you can pick up this issue for free by either registering or logging into your account. You can also get the back issues from the site too for more great reading.

Oracle announced today that it has made a strategic minority investment in Engine Yard, a leading cloud development platform that supports Ruby, PHP and Node.js, popular web development languages. [...] In conjunction with this investment, Oracle and Engine Yard expect to work closely together to provide cloud application developers with a greater choice of development and deployment options. The two companies are expected to connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment.

No word yet on how this will integrate with Oracle's own cloud solutions but it should be interesting to see what comes out of it. Congratulations to the Engine Yard folks on the investment!

We do managed hosting for over 5 years - a business where reliability is one of the core values. And Platform as a Service is just a label for a modern approach of scalable hassle-free hosting solutions. This PaaS market is very young and still a changing category in the wide field of cloud hosting. Listening to customers and their needs will influence the way current services work.

They offer a "Bootstrap" service if you'd like to try it out. It supports PHP 5.4, APC, MySQL, Git integration, Composer support, SSH/SFTP access and DNS management. You can also add on memcache and SSL support if desired.

We are currently building yet another PHP Cloud Platform ourselves. Of course we looked around to see what the others are up to. This is my (Franks) personal point of view of the current market situation showcasing my favorite services. I try not to judge, neither i will compare features nor prices.

Services on his list include:

• Heroku
• phpFog/appFog
• PagodaBox
• CloudControl
• EngineYard

The power of PHP and an RDBMS is the ability to nail the major features of an application with cheaply paid developers in a record amount of time. Unfortunately, the default runtime environment used by PHP is simply an unscalable mess. [...] The truth is that if you have enough servers and enough database servers, you don't have contention. [...] As it turns out, there's a modern solution to the problem: the cloud plus NoSQL. Cloud infrastructure gives us the ability to spin up enough servers, and a NoSQL database enables us to shard our data effectively.

They talk some about why they think PHP's runtine environment is "a dog" based on the non-native pooling of database connections and the lack of a thread-safe environment.

The bottom line: PHP applications are a load on the database due to the constraints of the concurrency model.

He points to the cloud architecture and NoSQL databases as solutions to the scalability problem, providing more scalable resources and flexible data sources.

You've watched RailsCasts, you've watched ZendCasts - but what about screencasts for PHP Cloud Development techniques? Well, we were surprised to find that there was nothing, yet, available to satisfy that need. There's cloud development casts for .Net developers and presumably for Java developers as well. But not much in the PHP space. So we decided to commit to the project and make it happen.

The shows will be about 10 to 20 minutes in length and will cover topics relevant to developing applications on cloud-based servers. They're still working on some of the first shows, but you can voice your opinions about what you'd like to hear about by commenting on commenting on this post.

For the past 10 years, the LAMP stack has laid waste to proprietary software stacks. Yes, Microsoft has held onto gargantuan profits, but LAMP has become the foundation for leading web services, whether Google or Facebook or [Insert Big Web Brand Here]. LAMP is the future. Or was. That is, until cloud killed it, as Eucalyptus CEO (and former MySQL CEO) Marten Mickos posits in a great keynote from the Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2012.

In the keynote he pointed out that it's becoming less about the whole setup and more about combining technologies to get the results you need - less "stack" and more "linked technology" (and not always the same tech for every node). He pointed to the Amazon AWS service as a prime example of a platform that allows endless flexibility as to what software can be installed and how it can be used, all with a few clicks of a mouse.

This article will walk you through cloud hosting for your PHP application with Pagoda Box. It'll detail how to handle PHP dependencies, get your MySQL databases up and running (and debug locally), and customise various aspects of PHP with ease.

He walks you through the entire process you'll need to fire up a (free) application on their service (including a database!):

• Sign up for a new account
• Create an application
• Set up git
• Create your public SSH key and upload it to Pagoda
• Commit to your repository and deploy your code

He also mentions a custom option Pagoda Box has included in their series - the Boxfile. This configuration file allows you to set up things like the environment you want your app to run in (PHP 5.3, MySQLi extension, etc) and set up some of the php.ini configuration settings. He also shows you how to set up the database instance and how to use their "pagoda" gem to create a temporary SSH tunnel from your development environment to their database server. He also briefly mentions the option they have of using a real domain name to point to your application.

We at php|architect want to honor those who give of themselves so that we can work with PHP and in this great ecosystem. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and want to pause to say thank you. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of March and is open to all php|architect subscribers.

The categories for this year's event are "Up & Coming", "Best Cloud Platform" and "Best PHP Application Platform". Nominees across all of the categories include Joind.in, PintLabs, AppFog, Pagoda Box Drupal 7 and SugarCRM. If you're a subscriber, get in there and vote for your favorites!

In this article I'm going to show you how to create a free Amazon EC2 cloud based LAMP Server and Point your domain to Amazon EC2 Instance. There are 4 simple steps to do.

The setup process is pretty easy - getting an Amazon free account, creating a server from an existing image, installing the LAMP stack and pointing your domain at the EC2 instance. He gives a step-by-step guide of the process, including the commands you'll need to execute to get all of the LAMP packages installed.