Rob Allen has published another post covering the use of serverless technology and PHP to run your applications. In this new post he shows how to use img2lambda to publish your Serverless PHP layer out to an AWS Lambda instance.

[The] img2lambda tool will take the layers of a Docker container and convert them to AWS layers for use in Lambda.

I poked around with Clare’s example and updated my lambda-php project in order to understand how it works. I also rewrote my runtime’s bootstrap to make it clearer.

The clever thing from my point of view is that you can build your PHP runtime layer locally using Docker and then publish the layers to AWS for use in your Lambda functions. This means you can now use the layer in different projects and have them all reference the same PHP runtime.

He digs deeper into the tool, looking at the "magic" happening under the covers using Docker. He provides an example of the Dockerfile it creates and walks through what it does. He then shows how to create the layer in AWS and use a serverless framework and a PHP runtime to execute the "hello world" application. He wraps up the post showing how to test it locally, building from the Dockerfile and using a docker run on the result with simple user input.

Rob Allen has a tutorial posted to his site showing how you can run PHP using the serverless lambda functionality that Amazon Web Services provides.

There are other serverless providers, and AWS Lambda is the market leader, but until recently PHP support could most charitably described as cumbersome. That all changed at the end of 2018 with Lambda’s new runtime API and support for layers.

Let’s look at the practicalities of serverless PHP on Lambda with Serverless Framework.

If you'd like to skip to the "good parts" you can check out this repository of the resulting code. Otherwise, he provides a complete walkthrough of the setup and code required to get the lambda up and running:

• compiling the PHP binary on an EC2 instance (so it will be compatible)
• creating a bootstrap file for handling requests
• setting up the yml configuration for the Serverless framework
• writing the "hello world" function
• deploying to the lambda system

Finally he shows how to call the "hello" function using the command line and the response you should receive.

On the AWS Developer Blog they've posted an announcement about the release of support for Amazon S3 Select in the AWS SDK for PHP. This "select" functionality allows for more powerful queries on the contents currently in your S3 buckets.

We’re excited to announce support for the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) SelectObjectContent API with event streams in the AWS SDK for PHP in version 3.67.11. Using Amazon S3 Select, you can query for a subset of data from an S3 object by using simple SQL expressions.

Amazon S3 streams the responses as a series of events, instead of returning the full API response all at once. This enables your applications to process the parts of the response as the application receives them. To support this new API behavior, the AWS SDK for PHP supports processing these events from the API response.

The post goes on to give a few examples of the use of the "select" functionality, querying the contents of a CSV file using the familiar SQL format. Example code is also included using the SelectObjectContent and EventParsingIterator to select and retrieve the results.

In a new post to his site Matthieu Napoli shows how, with the help of the Bref package, to run a serverless Laravel instance. This is a continuation from his previous post covering the use of serverless functionality for running plain PHP.

Serverless basically means “Running apps without worrying about servers”. The main difference with a traditional hosting is that you do not maintain the servers and reserve their capacity. They are scaled up or down automatically and you pay only for what you use.

[...] Serverless hosting has the advantages of scaling very well since there are (theoretically) no limits. It can also help optimize costs by avoiding paying for unused server resources. You can read more about advantages and drawbacks here.

After briefly introducing what "serverless" computing is, he dives right into the creation of the first lambda on AWS. He then goes through the process of creating the new Laravel project, installing and configuring Bref, and wrapping the Laravel functionality in its HTTP handler. Next, he shares an example of the serverless.yml configuration, how to set up the file storage (for things like sessions and cache) and configure the application to run correctly on the lambda. The post finishes out with a look at setting up the logging, session handling and routing before finally deploying the app using Bref's own command.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted a new tutorial showing you how to make use of the Laravel Forge service to deploy your PHP applications. Laravel Forge provides the configuration and automation tools to deploy your applications to servers on your own accounts (like DigitalOcean or AWS).

Developers love to automate things—for every process between development and production, they are keen to have a script that makes their workflow easier. This is also the case with deployment. The process of pushing the final build and deploying the app should be as easy as pressing a Deploy now button, but that is not what happens most of the time.

[...] Don't let the Laravel brand name mislead you. Apart from Laravel, you can use the service to host WordPress, Symphony, Statamic, or any other web project as long as it's PHP. Personally, I like Laravel Forge for its simplicity and ease of getting used to.

In this tutorial, I am going to take you through the steps to hook Laravel Forge with AWS and explore what it has to offer.

The tutorial starts with an overview of the service and what kind of setup and configuration the resulting servers have (by default). It then covers the various configuration options available and walks you through the process of setting it up with your AWS account. It also includes details about the server management system Forge provides, site management, SSH key addition and PHP/MySQL configuration. A few other helpful hints are also tossed in at the end covering task scheduling, daemons, monitoring and network/firewall configuration.

On the AWS PHP SDK blog there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the multipart uploader with client-side encryption via the library.

The AWS SDK for PHP released support for multipart uploads with client-side encryption in version 3.48.0 via the S3EncryptionMultipartUploader. With client-side encryption, data is encrypted and decrypted directly in your environment. This means that this data is encrypted before it’s transferred to Amazon S3, and you don’t rely on an external service to handle encryption for you.

Multipart uploads are designed to improve the upload experience for larger objects. With it, you can upload objects via parts that can be uploaded independently, in any order, and in parallel. You can use a multipart upload for objects from 5 MB to 5 TB in size.

The article then starts you off with the requirements you'll need to follow along and some sample code to get the client up and running. The code then shows how to perform the file upload, making use of a file stream (via fopen) to pull in the contents of the file. The tutorial finishes by describing some of the other fields that can be used with the client and links to other SDKs that support this same functionality in other languages.

On the AWS Developer blog they've posted a new tutorial showing you how to use client-side encryption in the AWS PHP SDK for interactions with the AWS S3 service.

The AWS SDK for PHP released an S3EncryptionClient in version 3.38.0. With client-side encryption, data is encrypted and decrypted directly in your environment. This means that this data is encrypted before it’s transferred to Amazon S3, and you don’t rely on an external service to handle encryption for you.

The AWS SDK for PHP implements envelope encryption and uses OpenSSL for its encrypting and decrypting. The implementation is interoperable with other SDKs that match its feature support. It’s also compatible with the SDK’s promise-based asynchronous workflow.

The tutorial then walks you through the setup of a new S3EncryptionClient instance and how to use the putObject method to push the file contents up to S3 automagically using the encryption. It also includes a code example of pulling the file contents down and decrypting the contents via a getObject call.

On the AWS Developer blog they've posted about a new update in their PHP SDK functionality: a "changelog builder" that helps with automated changelog generation.

Starting with version 3.22.10 of the AWS SDK for PHP, released February 23, 2017, the Changelog Builder automatically processes all changelog entries. Each pull request is required to have a changelog JSON blob as part of the request. The system also calculates the next version for the SDK based on the type of the changes that are defined in the given changelog JSON blob.

The update simplifies the process of adding release notes to the CHANGELOG.md file for each pull request. Each merged pull request that was part of the release results in a new entry to the CHANGELOG.md file. The entry describes the change and provides the TAG number and release date.

This changelog is generated from a required JSON document for each pull request that provides information about the type of change, category and a brief description. They explain each of these items to give a little more context as to what they should contain along with a few examples.

This is something that could definitely help to improve other libraries as well, gathering the required change information from the contributor rather than having a project administrator have to sift through the PR to locate all changes.

On the TeachersPayTeachers.com Engineering blog they've posted a retrospective of what they went through to scale to millions of views per day on AWS using Kubernetes, React, PHP, and Elixir.

Here at Teachers Pay Teachers (or TpT, as we call it) we’ve been in the process of migrating our website from a PHP monolith to a microservice based architecture utilizing React, Phoenix and GraphQL. To date, this migration has delighted our community of educators with it’s myriad of UX improvements. We’re able to objectively measure these improvements with our A/B testing infrastructure which also enables us to gradually expose functionality to broader and broader levels of traffic.

Our product page receives ~2 million pages views per day making it the most heavily trafficked page on TpT (here’s an example page). We decided to use a simple UI refresh as an opportunity to migrate the page to our new tech stack. This post dives deeply into the challenges we overcame while scaling the product page on our new infrastructure!

The post then shows an infographic of their migration and the major steps in the process along a timeline. They also include an overview of their updated architecture, specific technical issues found during the migration and handling server load. They also cover error spikes they saw just after scaling and how they were either able to resolve or just dismiss them as "red herrings".

On the Delicious Brains site they've posted a tutorial showing how to create a command line daemon that will emulate the Amazon Web Services SQSD handling. The SQSD is a worker daemon service that Amazon offers as a part of its Elastic Beanstalk support.

Sometimes when you’re building a project there are parts of the architecture that exist on production that don’t exist on your development machine. Those missing parts (like proprietary software that’s specific to your hosting provider) can sometimes mean unwelcome surprises when you deploy to production.

Recently as part of my work on Mergebot, I decided to address this. My local machine was missing the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Worker Environment SQS daemon (known as SQSD). AWS isn’t open source so there’s, unfortunately, no official way to replicate it. So I decided to build a small PHP command line (CLI) app to attempt to replicate its functionality. In this article, I’m going to cover some of the aspects of creating a command line app in PHP and explain how I implemented them for my replica SQSD CLI.

He starts off with a brief overview of the Laravel queue worker and how it compares to the SQSD functionality. He then starts in on the code to create the daemon (outside of a framework) and adding in the while loop to keep it running as a daemon making use of the SQSD Worker class as a base. The post ends with some instructions on packaging up the command line tool using the phar functionality already included in the PHP language.