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.

The 7PHP.com site has a tutorial they've recently posted showing you how to get Magnto 2 installed on an AWS instance running LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP).

This article tries to demonstrate how to setup an AWS (EC2) instance, installing a LEMP stack, preparing the server environment to meet Magento’s requirements and then to finally install Magento v2 using command line approach. [...] I’m presenting in this article something which might otherwise seem to be a daunting approach – but I also see it as an approach which you can later automate by using Docker/Dockerfile for example or even using a Vagrant appliance.

He takes you through the entire process, including the setup of the account and instance on the AWS side, with screenshots along the way:

• Creating a Free Tier AWS Account
• Preparing & Configuring your AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating A Security Group For Our AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating a PEM file – Key Pairs
• Creating our AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating an Elastic IP & Assigning to our EC2 Instance
• Preparing & Configuring our AWS EC2 Instance
• Installing Our LEMP Stack
• The Magento 2 Project Installation Walkthrough
• Configuring nginx conf file to serve our magento site
• Creating a database & running The Magento Setup From Commandline

You'll find all the commands, screenshots and output examples you'll need to follow along with the tutorial easily. There's also links to other resources if you're interested in finding out more about the setup.

On the Amazon Web Services blog today Jeremy Lindblom shares a quick way you can use the AWS SDK to create an EC2 instance directly from PHP in just a few lines of code.

Amazon EC2 is a powerful AWS service that includes the ability to provision on-demand servers. While you can easily do this through the AWS Management Console, in this post, I want show you how to use the AWS SDK for PHP to do it programmatically by interacting with the Amazon EC2 API.

He starts with an outline of the steps (requiring a little bit of EC2-side configuration first) and shows how to use the SDK. His code sets up the client, creates the key pair and security group then is ready to make the instance. You can give the "runInstances" method a configuration that includes number of instances and what type. There's also some hooks back into the request that can tell you when the instances are running and how to get the path to the new instance (for ssh access).

On CoderWall.com there's a post sharing some findings about how RockThePost.com scaled PHP to 30,000 concurrent users on Amazon EC2 instances.

RockThePost.com is a LAMP stack hosted on Ec2. We're preparing to be featured in an email which will be sent to ~1M investors... all at the same time. For our 2 person engineering department, that meant we had to do a quick sanity check to see just how many people we can support concurrently.

They have a list of five suggestions/opinions on what has helped them scale out to this level including using Varnish for caching, turning on APC (PHP opcode caching) and using a c1.xlarge EC2 instance. They used Google Analytics and Siege to run their load testing on the "exterior" of the site.

On DZone.com there's WordPress instance on an Amazon EC2 instance with the help of Puppet and Joyent appliance, migrating to Linode, and finally, to Amazon with a Bitnami stack, we noticed the common pain of manually configuring each of these environments. Bitnami caused us an even bigger headache by being very difficult to update (apt-get doesn't update the bitnami wrapped AMP stack). We decided to get full control of our box by setting up a stock Debian LAMP stack on AWS using Puppet and git to manage our sites. Here's a gentle introduction on how we did it.

He guides you through the entire process:

• Setting up a micro instance on EC2
• Signing up for unfuddle (for git)
• Installing Puppet (standalone)
• Setting up your git repository to point to unfuddle
• The needed Puppet configuration files to get the WordPress instance deployed

Complete code (and commands) are provided in the post.

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.

SitePoint's PHPMaster has a new post today, the third part of a series helping you get your application from "zero to cloud" on an Amazon EC2 setup. In this latest post they wrap things up by showing how to set up the full lamp stack on the remote server. Here's part one and two that lead up to this latest part.

This is the final article in a three part series focused on setting up EC2 as a sandbox for application developers. I assume you have an AWS account with Amazon; if you don’t, please read Part 1 to learn how easy it is to sign up. I also assume you have configured your development environment and installed an AMI; if you haven’t, please read Part 2. In this installment, we’ll learn how to install Apache, MySQL and PHP in our running AMI, and then clone the AMI to make our own.

Included in the post are all the commands you'll need to get the packages installed for PHP, MySQL, Apache 2, PEAR and the PHP command line binary. With all of that installed, they show you how to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to make it easier to scale in the future.

On SitePoint.com today there's a new guide posted about how to get a WordPress instance up and running on an Amazon EC2 instance and the Microsoft Web Platform.

One claim I often hear from web developers, especially those who offer website design and consulting services, is their need to quickly launch websites that run fast and give them total control of the server for maximum flexibility and scalability. This is a quick tutorial on how to do just that, with a guided tour on how to run WordPress on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud and the Microsoft Web Platform. [...] WordPress and EC2 come together in a really slick way, giving you a super-fast blog or website in just a few minutes.

For those that don't already have an EC2 instance, he helps you get that set up first complete with an almost one-click install of a WordPress instance. With the help of the Web Platform Installer you can easily install not only WordPress but all of the other technology it needs to get running quickly. Screenshots accompany the tutorial descriptions to help make the whole process even simpler.