In a recent post to his blog Maarten Balliauw (the third part of a series) looks at how you can use Azure to scale your PHP-based application dynamically using the latest version of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. His example creates a simple shell script that can scale up or down your instances with one call.

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications.

Using the SDK, he shows how to create the command-line tool buy craeting a management client and setting up the command line parameters to give to the setInstanceCountBySlot() method. This gives you the ability to spawn off as many new "slots" (instances) as you might need quickly and easily.