As mentioned in this post to The Register, Zend, a large player in the PHP market, has announced their own cloud-based platform for deploying PHP-based applications - phpcloud.com.

Zend has announced a cloud for building and deploying PHP apps on other clouds – but without the management hassle. The PHP specialist has announced phpcloud.com, which it said was a technology platform and a partner ecosystem based on the company's Zend Framework and Server. Details are vague, but the technology platform consists of Zend App Fabric and Zend Developer Cloud. The App Fabric uses the Zend Framework - a library of loosely coupled PHP components - with Zend's PHP stack and management and diagnostics tools.

The platform comes with features for caching, job queuing, high availability and code traces (among others). It plays especially nice with Zend's Studio development tool. The site, phpcloud.com has full details on what the platform offers and how you can get started with it quickly and easily with a free developer account.