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're pleased to announce the general availability of PHP 5.4 for Orchestra PHP Cloud. We are committed to keeping your apps running on the latest and greatest version of PHP. After careful lab testing, we'll upgrade your apps as newer versions of PHP become available. What if you're still using PHP 5.3? Don't worry, Orchestra PHP Cloud will continue to maintain its PHP 5.3 stack. You will be able to choose which version of PHP you would like to use when you launch a new app.

The default when you set up a new application will now be PHP 5.4, so be sure you're paying attention on setup if you need something else. You can find out more about the Orchestra PaaS on the Engine Yard site and try it out for free to see how your app performs.

I am evaluating these platforms in order to see if either one can ease my sysadmin burden. Well, so far, as with any cloud service promising the next best thing since sliced bread, I got mixed feelings. For the moment I tested just the free tier of both platforms. While Orchestra uses a pay-as-you-go model, PHP Fog asked for $29/mo in order to drag that number of servers slider. That's a little bit much for a plain evaluation aka not so cloud-ish model where you don't need upfront investments.

The reviewer walks through the setup of each side - the server creation and configuration, how things are handled with the load balancer, the caching layer, the application server technology stack, app design considerations and the deployment process.

Enter the newcomer to the world of PHP deployment options: Platform as a Service (PaaS). You may be rolling your eyes at the introduction of yet another buzzword and acronym, but before you dismiss it, consider how it might fit in to your application hosting strategy. I've heard Platform as a Service described as a "layer above the cloud," that is, it builds on the existing cloud infrastructure, like Amazon's EC2, but abstracts away all the setup and maintenance tasks of running an entire server. As David Coallier described it to me, the goal is to "deploy apps, not servers."

Joel mentions two different offerings that have popped up recently - PHPFog and Orchestra. Both services have some nice features that he gets into including application templates, git integration and configuration for specific kinds of technologies (like database support and memcache availability).