The Delicious Brains blog has posted the third part of their series covering the scaling of Laravel with AWS Beanstalk. In this latest article the walk through the setup of the Elastic Beanstalk application.

In my last article we set up the supporting services we would require for our Laravel app once we deploy it to the Elastic Beanstalk architecture. We created a VPC to keep our infrastructure secure, we created a MySQL database in RDS, and we set up ElastiCache for our Redis cache. So now that our Laravel app is decoupled and our supporting services are in place, it’s finally time to deploy our app to Elastic Beanstalk.

They start by talking about the Elastic Beanstalk environments and helping you get the application set up via the command line tool. Next up is the creation of the ebextensions directory and the matching YAML configurations for the EB settings. They provide an example of the contents` and explain what some of the configuration sets up. Finally they use the command line tool to issue the "create" command and build out the environment based on the configuration. The post wraps up with a bit about some configuration tweaks that could be made and optionally enabling HTTPS.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from Daniel Berman giving you a step by step guide to setting up an Elastic LAMP stack on AWS, the Amazon Web Services platform using Zend Server.

This article introduces what is probably one of the simplest ways of setting up and running an elastic LAMP stack on the cloud – using Zend Server on AWS.

More specifically, the workflow described here includes launching a pre-configured AWS CloudFormation template that sets up all the components of a LAMP stack: Zend Server’s certified PHP stack plus all of Zend Server’s add-on features (including Z-Ray), a MySQL database, a Zend Server elastic group consisting of additional Zend Server instances, an elastic load balancer, and other pre-configured security definitions. This article is perfect for those contemplating moving their production environment to the cloud or those who already have one set up on AWS.

He starts with some of the basics: what Zend Server is and what role CloudFormation plays in the deployment process. The rest of the tutorial is broken up into several steps of the setup and deployment process:

• Step 1: Launching the stack
• Step 2: Managing the stack
• Step 3: Deploying an application
• Step 4: Monitoring the stack

They include screenshots of the web-based interfaces you'll use to complete each of these steps, giving you a great visual guide to where you should be and what things should look like. In the end you'll have a simple application, running in AWS on Zend Server you can easily monitor and configure.

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.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today Vito Chin has posted a new article dealing with PHP and "the Cloud" - where the popular web language fits into the move towards cloud computing.

Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. [...] Cloud-based development involves in some sense, the outsourcing, of various parts of the application out of the server and into the cloud.

Included is an illustration of how an application would interact with the cloud and an example of working with the S3 service that Amazon offers. The example mentions both the normal services and something called the "elastic compute cloud" that lets you use remote services to run virtual instances of other operating systems.