On the UserSnap blog Luciano Mammino has provided a guide to building fast applications in the cloud using PHP and several tools and techniques. He offers a list of six rules to follow to make building the applications fast (and fast applications).

In this post Luciano highlighted some of the most common principles you should consider while building high performing web applications (specifically on the backend part). The following concepts discussed here can be applied to any language and framework. Though this post will cover some concrete examples, design patterns and tools that are mostly used in the PHP ecosystem.

His list of rules includes tips like:

• Avoid premature optimization
• Defer the work you don’t need to do immediately
• Use cache when you can
• Prepare your app for horizontal scalability when possible

Each point comes with a paragraph or two of explanation as to why it's an issue to watch out for and some tips to help prevent it as well as tools that can help.