The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast, with hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann, has posted their latest episode with special guest Thijs Feryn talking about the build/provision/deploy pipeline "in the cloud".

In this weeks episode we are joined by Thijs Feryn to discuss his upcoming PHP UK conference talk. We start of the show highlighting what drew him to a Tech. evangelist role, bridging the gap between code/infrastructure and the ideas behind ‘Infrastructure as Code’. From here we move on to discuss system and infrastructure provisioning automation tools such Ansible and Terraform. This leads on to adding Packer into the mix, moving towards immutable infrastructure, testing these automation tools and how history has a way of repeating itself. Finally, we touch upon the philosophy behind DevOps, focusing on empathy and its core values CAMS.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new shows are released.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a tutorial posted to his site showing you how to create a PHP application on a SAP platform that includes PostgreSQL and Redis via Cloud Foundry.

Keeping on with my study of SAP’s cloud platform (SCP) and Cloud Foundry today I’m going to build a simple PHP application. This application serves a simple Bootstrap landing page. The application uses a HTTP basic authentication. The credentials are validated against a PostgreSQL database. It also has a API to retrieve the localtimestamp from database server (just for play with a database server). I also want to play with Redis in the cloud too, so the API request will have a Time To Live (ttl) of 5 seconds. I will use a Redis service to do it.

He then walks you through the process of setting up both the platform and the application:

• creating the services in cloud foundry
• create our application (with either Silex or Lumen)
• built out the features
• running the application locally for testing
• connecting to the cloud servers for PostgreSQL and Redis
• set up logging
• set up basic authorization

Full code and configuration is included for each step of the way (with Lumen examples included because Silex is "dead").

The Dev.to blog has a tutorial posted from author Saquib Rizwan showing an easy way to deploy a Laravel application to Cloudways via their platform and the PHP stack they offer.

Even if you know all about it, setting up and configuring a dedicated server is a time consuming multi-step process. But thanks to managed hosting solutions available in the market today, setting up servers is no longer a major action item on project task lists.

Deploying Laravel application on cloud infrastructure is never been this fast and easy before. [...] Cloudways provides an incredible platform for Laravel Community. It makes it easy to deploy and host laravel applications so that developers can focus on the development process rather than worrying about deployment and server level issues.

The post lists out some of the benefits of the Cloudways platform before starting in on the technology behind their "ThunderStack" PHP environment. With the basics covered, Saquib then moves on to deploying the server via Cloudways, linking it to your application on GitHub and providing the proper key information for them to connect. With all of this in place, the "Start Deployment" button is ready for use and the application and server can be started quickly.

On the CloudWays blog there's a new post with comments from several members of the PHP community about why they feel that managed cloud hosting is a better option when it comes to hosting their applications.

Not many people realize that their choice of hosting solution could determine the success or failure of their project. Even the best code base fails to perform to its maximum potential because of a hosting solution that fails to provide appropriate support.

[...] In order to understand why many industry leaders recommend managed cloud hosting for PHP projects, it is important to understand the benefits of these hosting solutions. In effect, managed cloud hosting offers three important benefits.

These three benefits involve the offloading of the usual hassles of server management, improved security and scalability. Members of the PHP community that contributed their opinions include:

• Anna Filina
• Adam Wathan
• Josh Lockhart
• Tessa Mero
• Matt Stauffer
• Manuel Lemos

Check out the full article to read their thoughts on why managed cloud hosting is the way forward.

On the SitePoint PHP blog author Prosper Otemuyiwa shares what they call the ultimate guide to deploying PHP apps in the cloud with examples for Heroku, Google Cloud, IBM BlueMix, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Laravel Forge.

There is a popular mantra amongst developers that goes like this write, test and deploy. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to deploy your PHP apps to different cloud server platforms such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, and others.

Cloud servers are basically virtual servers that run within a cloud computing environment. There are various benefits to hosting and deploying your applications in the cloud. [...] In fact, many companies have moved their infrastructure to the cloud in order to reduce cost and complexity. It’s a great option for small, mid-sized, and enterprise scale businesses. If you write a lot of tutorials and do POCs (Proof-of-concepts) like me, it’s also a great choice for you!

He starts off by covering the technologies that will be involved in each deploy: Linux, Apache, MySQL and of course PHP. Then, for each of the platforms previously mentioned, he goes through the setup and configuration of the same functionality. Most include screenshots of the UI in the service setting up the account and application. He also links to two tools that can make it easier to deploy your actual application to these newly configured cloud instances: Envoyer and Deployer.

On the Liip blog there's a new post showing you how to set up "testing in the cloud" with the help of AWS and a Bamboo instance along with some custom configuration.

Bamboo is the continous integration service by Atlassian, the company owning the code management service Bitbucket (as well as the Jira issue tracker and Confluence wiki). Bamboo can run test suites and build any kind of artefact like generated documentation or installable packages. It integrates with Amazon Web Services, allowing to spin up EC2 instances as needed.

The article talks about the permissioning needed for the EC2 AWS instances and how to trigger automatic builds. They then get into the details of configuring the test runner and the PHPUnit setup to allow for the execution of your tests.

In a new tutorial on the NetTuts.com site they show you how to use a Digital Ocean PHP SDK to manage your cloud instances from a PHP-based application.

The Digital Ocean API allows you to manage Droplets and resources in a simple, programmatic way using HTTP requests. All of the functionality that you are familiar with in the Digital Ocean control panel is also available through the API, allowing you to script the complex actions that your situation requires. For this tutorial, we'll integrate developer Antoine Corcy's Digital Ocean V2 PHP API Library into a Yii-based console application.

They walk you through the full process of the setup - getting your access keys, getting the PHP SDK and setting up a component as an interface for the rest of the Yii2 application to use. From there, he shows three examples of the types of commands to can issue:

• Fetching Droplets
• Fetching Images
• Automating Snapshots

Each example comes with the code to implement it and screenshots of both how the same functionality looks in the Digital Ocean control panel and the output of their script.

In this recent post to his site Samuel Stenton shows you how to get Ghost (a recent player in the blogging space) and Node.js installed on a Laravel Forge server. The Laravel Forge service makes it quick and easy to create and launch virtual machines on the cloud service of your choosing.

He's broken it down into five steps (not including signing up for Forge if you haven't already):

• Step 1: Install Node.js
• Step 2: Download and Configure Ghost
• Step 3: Install and Run
• Step 3: Configure NGINX to Serve our Ghost Blog Correctly
• Step 5: Not finished quite yet!

That final step includes the instructions to restart the needed software when/if the server happens to be rebooted.

On the Google Cloud Platform blog there's a recent post showing you how to directly integrate the Google App Engine PHP support with the popular PHP IDE PhpStorm for seamless development.

Our IDE for PHP, PhpStorm, provides seamless integration with Google App Engine for PHP - allowing you to locally develop, debug and deploy your PHP applications on Google App Engine. When testing your application locally, we also support full emulation of App Engine services through the App Engine Development server. The [introductory] video shows how to get started with Google App Engine for PHP in PhpStorm. We also have a comprehensive tutorial which covers Google App Engine with PhpStorm in detail.

His example shows how to integrate the IDE with the Google Cloud SQL service. He shows how to create a new user (via the API console) and how to connect that user in PhpStorm. He includes a CREATE statement for a sample table and the PHP code to connect.

If you weren't able to make it to this year's ZendCon conference that just happened in Santa Clara, you can get at least a little piece of it from this new post to the Zend blog. It's a video from a keynote session from Peter Magnusson titled "Rise of the Native Cloud Developer."

At his keynote session at ZendCon, he shared some of the important and sometimes unexpected lessons Google learned while building for the cloud – such as the importance of lightweight execution containers, relying on failure, and how to overcome the speed of light when building distributed systems.

And then he went ahead to discuss about the rise of the “Cloud Native” developer – how engineers and organisations large and small now using these principles to build truly robust and scalable services, and businesses.

You can watch it embedded in the post or full size on Youtube.