In this new post to her site Alison shows how to send emails through the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) from a CentOS instance (an AMI in this case).

If you find yourself using Amazon SES for sending outgoing emails in a PHP web app, getting everything set up is much simpler than it may seem. In my case, this was on an AWS Linux image, but it will work on any Fedora/CentOS AMI. You can, of course, set up sendmail and use a proper MTA to send email from your web app, but in this case, I had inherited the requirement to set up an environment for code that was already written to use SES for outgoing email and Google Apps for incoming emails, so the actual mechanics weren't up for debate.

She includes screenshots showing how to configure the SES system with your site's domains and DNS as well as the email addresses you're planning on using. She links over to the MSMTP software you'll need to install on your instance to make the connection and what you'll need to do to get it configured for PHP's use. A sample email script is also included to test the connection (and where to look to make sure everything worked correctly).

Andi Gutmans has a new post to his site about a recent update to the offerings on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) - it now offers Zend Server 6 as an installable option.

Zend Server 6 is the ideal application platform for mobile and web applications, and this version brings a new level of enterprise capabilities. [...] Today, I'm also pleased to share that this newest version of Zend Server is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Now, for one combined fee with Amazon Web Services, you can run your applications on a fully supported PHP application platform with Zend Server 6 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Linux.

If you're interested in what Zend Server has to offer, check out the product page on the Zend website. Zend Server handles a lot of the base level things for you and can help you get up and running quickly. It includes things like detailed monitoring, error tracking, code tracing and a nice UI to for management and configuration of the server.

A while back Alan Forbes started a Kickstarter project to write a PHP book, "The Joy of PHP". This book was targeted at those that wanted to learn PHP and "have some fun along the way". The book has been finished and, in a special promotion, is being offered free of charge through Amazon and for the next five days.

The book "The Joy of PHP" by Alan Forbes now available as a Kindle book on Amazon.com. Starting today (or tomorrow, depending on Amazon) and lasting only 5 days the book will be absolutely free. The only "catch" is that the author is asking for reviews. In other words, once you've taken a look a the book please go back to the book listing on Amazon and give it a star rating from 1 to 5 to help the author build momentum for the book.

You can find out more about the book on its website and, if you don't want the Kindle version, pick up a copy of the PDF version for just $12 USD.

UPDATE: the free offer for this book has been extended and is available for no cost for a limited time!

The Amazon Web Services group has recently released an updated version of their SDK for PHP and at it's heart is the open source project Guzzle (a HTTP client framework).

The new SDK is built on top of the Guzzle HTTP client framework, which provides increased performance and enables event-driven customization. Each AWS service client extends the Guzzle client and describes operations on the service using a service description file. The SDK now manages persistent connections for both serial and parallel requests. It detects transient network failures, with automatic retries using truncated exponential backoff. Support for event hooks (via the Symfony2 EventDispatcher) allows you to implement custom, event-driven behavior.

In the AWS post about the update, they give you a few code snippets showing this updated version in use. This completely reworked version of the SDK is not compatible with the previous version, so you'll need to consult their migration guide to bring things up to date.

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted showing how you can work with the Amazon DynamoDB to store session information from your PHP application (originally posted on CloudSpring).

This tutorial will show you how to use Amazon DynamoDB as a storage facility for PHP sessions. This method becomes very useful when your applications take advantage of the Elastic Load Balancing and Autoscaling services. You will need Amazon AWS account enabled to use EC2, Elastic Load Balancer and DynamoDB as a prerequisite to play along the tutorial.

He starts with a description of what the elastic load balancing service is and how it autoscales. He shows how, based on this demo application, to use a custom PHP session handler that implements the Amazon SDK libraries to hook into the DynamoDB service. Also included are screenshots (and the steps that go with them) to configure the service itself.

On the "A Cloudy Place" blog there's a recent post about the steps the author ( Shameer) to to get PHP and Git set up on the Elastic Beanstalk service from Amazon.

When Amazon announced Beanstalk's support for PHP I was curious to know what it would look like. So I decided to give it a try. I hadn't used my AWS account for a while, so I had to do some account setup tasks, configuring command line tools, etc. In this article I will explain how to set up a PHP application in Beanstalk from scratch.

He walks you through the entire process (complete with some screenshots) of getting the command line tools set up, creating your first PHP application and connecting it to your git repository. There's no database instructions included because the default EC2 instance doesn't include them. You'll need to refer to these instructions if you need that for your application.

In this new article on DZone.com, Artur Mkrtchyan shows you how to get an Amazon EC2 instance up and running and get a LAMP server set up and ready to go.

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.

In this new post to his blog Matthew Turland shows how to set up a puppet configuration to deploy and set up an EC2 environment for Drupal.

I'm currently working on a project that involves running Drupal on Amazon EC2. To save time in setting up future new VM instances, I decided to take the opportunity to learn puppet. For the time being, I'm using a single VM to run the full LAMP stack and running puppet without a server by copying my puppet manifest to the VM and using puppet's apply command to apply it locally. However, this manifest can easily be adapted for a multi-VM environment.

He includes the full configuration in the post that does a few things including setting up the correct PHP timezone, starting up the Apache instance, installing a few PHP modules (like PDO, MySQL and GD) and setting up the MySQL server. He also includes the commands needed to run the configuration and point it at the correct EC2 instance.

In this new post, Sameer Borate shows you how to use his Amazon BrowseNodes script to work with the returned data from the Amazon Advertising API.

The BrowseNodes tool automatically gets all the child BrowseNodes and their names. The program recursively traverses the BrowserNode hierarchy and returns all the BrowseNodes and their respective names. You can display the nodes on the console or save it to a CSV file. You can also include the library in your existing projects to process BrowseNodes.

You'll need curl support on your system to make it work. Several code examples are included showing how to grab a certain node, showing a list of nodes, saving the node information to a CSV, changing locales and getting the parent node for the current node.

On the php|architect site there's a recent tutorial from Cal Evans about building a transactional email system with the help of a simple library and the SES system from Amazon.

I love APIs. A well-defined API can make short work of a complex problem. It's even more fun when you find a cool API with a great wrapper to make it simple to use. That's what I found when I started playing with Amazon's Simple Email Service; a tool that was easy to work with, solved a problem I needed solved, and had a simple to use PHP wrapper.

Based on the SES library by Dan Meyers, he includes the code to pull in a simple email template and populate it with the values you want, log in to the Amazon SES service and send the email via the remote service.