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.

Freek Van der Herten has a post to his site showing you how to set up Varnish with a Laravel Forge server. Forge is a service that makes it simpler to set up and manage servers and the applications installed without having to mess with the details yourself.

For a project we’re working on at Spatie we’re expecting high traffic. That’s why we spent some time researching how to improve the request speed of a Laravel application and the amount of requests a single server can handle. There are many strategies and services you can use to speed up a site. In our specific project one of the things we settled on is Varnish. In this post I’d like to share how to set up Varnish on a Forge provisioned server.

He gives a high level overview of what Varnish is and what benefit it provides to your application (complete with illustrations) and includes a link to a presentation introducing Varnish to PHP developers. Then he moves on to installing Varnish on the server, updating the VCL configuration file and opening a port for you to use when connecting to the Varnish service. He shows the difference in the response headers when Varnish handles the response and the updates you'll need to make to get your Laravel application to play nicely with Varnish with this package.

He ends the post with examples of how to test the performance difference and some final steps to update the config and have it run on port 80 instead of the default 6081.

A new tutorial has been posted on the php[architect] site today showing you how to build a VM for Drupal 8 with the help of Vagrant.

At this year’s php[world] hackathon, I spent my time getting a Vagrant machine configured to run Drupal 8. I know there are other options, like Acquia’s own Dev Desktop, or even Zend Server. However, I like using Vagrant to run my LAMP stacks, especially on OS X. I’ve never been able to easily run xAMP on non-Linux machines. Installing MySQL can be a pain, system updates can change the version of PHP you’re running, and some PHP extensions are really difficult to build—even with Homebrew. Vagrant simplifies getting a working development environment running by automating the provision of a virtual machine for you, usually with a tool like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible.

Oscar (the author) took advantage of some time at the php[world] hackathon to create the necessary files for building this environment. He walks you through the steps to creating the basic vagrant file with "config" options (explaining each one) and walks through the setup of additional options, software like Apache and Drupal. He then sets up the Ansible configuration to create the box, run the provisioning and configuration of the resulting server. Finally, he shows the result of the install if everything was successful.

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).

In a new post to his blog Chris Hartjes shows you how to get PHP 5.4 installed on a CentOS machine (virtual machine) with the help of Vagrant.

I like the idea of using Vagrant to create virtual machines for my development work. Doing things this way I think keeps the host machine cleaner and allows you the ability to distribute those VM’s to other people as well. My old boss Ben Ramsey did a very informative post on getting PHP 5.4 configured on CentOS so I decided to one-up him by taking his instructions and creating a Puppet manifest so you could do this using Vagrant or on any server that you can provision using Puppet.

He example is based off of the publiclly available Vagrant setup and provides the contents of the Vagrantfile that he uses to set up the machine. From there, Puppet takes over and uses his configuration (also included) to set up things like the Apache server, some configurations for it, a list of PHP extensions and, of course, PHP itself.