On the Symfony blog Ryan Weaver shares a "behind the scenes" look at how the project handles and has automated their documentation generation process with the help of the Platform.sh service.

[Symfony's documentation](https://github.com/symfony/symfony-docs) is an open source project with more than 800 contributors. That’s great! But our goal is to always make it easier to contribute and faster to merge in changes. And today, we’ve started doing something really cool to improve our workflow: integration with [Platform.sh](https://platform.sh).

Platform.sh is a hosting solution that provides out-of-the-box continuous deployment for Symfony, Drupal and any other PHP applications. It extends the concept of a Git branch at the infrastructure level. Basically, this means that it’s easy to deploy every branch and/or Pull Request to its own URL.

He talks about the documentation's format (Sphinx) and how, while it does provide flexibility it also can lead to maintenance issues too. Changes can't be seen immediately and it's difficult to review. Instead they worked up a process where each pull request was automatically deployed to its own unique URL. This reduces both issues they were setting around instant feedback and review problems and provides a better experience for the developer overall.

The Platform.sh blog has a post showing you how to create flamegraphs with XHProf for your application's execution and overall performance. A "flamegraph" is just a different sort of graph stacking up the execution times for the methods and functions in your application so they look more like a "flame" than just numbers.

One of the most frequent needs a web application has is a way to diagnose and evaluate performance problems. Because Platform.sh already generates a matching new environment for each Git branch, diagnosing performance problems for new and existing code has become easier than ever to do without impacting the behavior of a production site. This post will demonstrate how to use a Platform.sh environment along with the XHProf PHP extension to do performance profiling of a Drupal application and create flamegraph images that allow for easy evaluation of performance hotspots.

While they show it at work on a Platform.sh instance, the method can be altered slightly to work with your own application with the right software installed. Their example uses the brendangregg/FlameGraph library to do the majority of the graphing work. He shows how to have the code switch on XHProf during the execution and where to put the file for later evaluation. They include the resulting directories and files created from the execution and how to view the resulting (SVG-based) graphs directly in a browser.

In this latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Chris Ward takes a "first look" at the Platform.sh development and deployment service.

Not so long ago, many of us were satisfied handling deployment of our projects by uploading files via FTP to a web server. [...] The old methods for deploying became unstable, unreliable and (generally) untrusted. [...] So was born a new wave of tools, services and workflows designed to simplify the process of deploying complex web applications, along with a plethora of accompanying commercial services. Generally, they offer an integrated toolset for version control, hosting, performance and security at a competitive price. Platform.sh is a newer player on the market, built by the team at Commerce Guys, who are better known for their Drupal eCommerce solutions.

He talks about some of the requirements for using the service (including Drush, the Drupal command line tool) and how to get started with a new project. He shows how to get the codebase with their CLI tool, pushing SQL data up to the instance, and starting in on some development work. He shows how to configure the modules you want to use and adding some additional content to the data. He also covers some of the other features of Platform.sh including: performance and profiling tools and integration with Redis, Solr and the EntityCache/AuthCache tools.