The Laravel News podcast, hosted by Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, has posted their latest episode - Episode #59: Scaling Laravel, testing Vue components, and model events

Join Jake and Michael as they discuss the latest Laravel releases, Scaling Laravel, testing Vue components, and more.

Other topics mentioned include the announcement about Let's Encrypt wildcard certificates and how to use Font Awesome 5 SVGs with Laravel Blade. You can listen to this latest show either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show and want to hear more, check out their archives at the bottom of the page and subscribe to their feed for updates on new shows as they're released.

On the TeachersPayTeachers.com Engineering blog they've posted a retrospective of what they went through to scale to millions of views per day on AWS using Kubernetes, React, PHP, and Elixir.

Here at Teachers Pay Teachers (or TpT, as we call it) we’ve been in the process of migrating our website from a PHP monolith to a microservice based architecture utilizing React, Phoenix and GraphQL. To date, this migration has delighted our community of educators with it’s myriad of UX improvements. We’re able to objectively measure these improvements with our A/B testing infrastructure which also enables us to gradually expose functionality to broader and broader levels of traffic.

Our product page receives ~2 million pages views per day making it the most heavily trafficked page on TpT (here’s an example page). We decided to use a simple UI refresh as an opportunity to migrate the page to our new tech stack. This post dives deeply into the challenges we overcame while scaling the product page on our new infrastructure!

The post then shows an infographic of their migration and the major steps in the process along a timeline. They also include an overview of their updated architecture, specific technical issues found during the migration and handling server load. They also cover error spikes they saw just after scaling and how they were either able to resolve or just dismiss them as "red herrings".

On the Digital Ocean blog there's a new post with a "practical overview" of how to effectively scale PHP applications, specifically as it relates to horizontal scaling not vertical.

Shipping a website or application to production has its own challenges, but when it gets the right traction, it’s a great accomplishment. It always feels good to see the visitor numbers going up, doesn’t it? Except, of course, when your traffic increases so much that it crashes your little LAMP stack. [...] But fear not! There are ways to make your PHP application much more reliable and consistent. If the term scalability crossed your mind, you've got the right idea.

The article starts with a brief overview of what scalability is and the main difference between horizontal and vertical scaling (scaling out vs scaling up). They then get into a bit more detail about what horizontal scaling is and how it commonly works in relation to the average PHP application (complete with diagrams). They also talk about some things you can do inside your code to help make things flow a bit more smoothly including decoupling between services and user session/file consistency measures. There's also a bit at the end about load balancing but as that depends a good bit on what technology you're using and the actual load, they just provide an overview and some links to other articles and tutorials with more information.

The latest episode of the /Dev/Hell podcast has officially been released, Episode #45: Single Quotes for Web Scale, as hosted by PHP community members Ed Finkler and Chris Hartjes (and joined by guest Steve Corona).

This week is all about PERSONAL BRANDING and WEB SCALE with special guest Steve Corona. We talk about Steve’s book Scaling PHP. We also reminisce about the old days of Twitter API dev, until Steve humiliates Ed by not knowing what Spaz was.

Topics mentioned in this episode include the Scaling PHP book, Twitpic, double quotes versus single quotes in PHP and horizontal versus vertical scaling. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

Gonzalo Ayuso has posted a second part of his look at scaling Silex (here's part one). In this new article he shows how to use the RouteCollection functionality instead of defining the routes in the DI configuration.

In the post Scaling Silex applications I wanted to organize a one Silex application. In one comment Igor Wiedler recommended us to use RouteCollections instead of define the routes with a Symfony’s Dependency Injection Container. Because of that I started to hack a little bit about it and here I show you my outcomes:

He includes example code for creating the application, setting up the main "routes.yml" file with some defaults and two other files for routes in other parts of the site - "api" and "blog". Then he makes the controllers related to these three sections with basic actions catching each of the routes. The source for the entire thing is over on github.

Igor Wiedler has a new post to his site today talking about scaling Silex-based applications (a microframework based on Symfony components) and using it for more than just the basic applications.

One common misconception about silex and microframeworks in general is that they are only suited for small, simple apps, APIs and prototyping. Of course, those use cases are the main selling point, but they are by no means the limit of what is possible.

He shares some code that's the common "first steps" for someone using the framework, but points out a better way - moving your controller handling out into separate files instead. With a built-in feature of Silex, you can specify the "path" to another class file that will handle the request and return the response back to the main app. He also suggests extracting even more of the functionality out into "service" classes to handle the processing, cleaning up the controllers even more. He finishes off the post with a brief comparison between Silex and a full Symfony2 application, noting that Silex is a bit more "free form" when it comes to structure where Symfony2 apps are pretty well defined and have their conventions.

On the Oracle Technology Network today, the part two of "Scaling PHP MySQL Web Applications" (from Eli White) has been published. Part one can be found here.

In Part 1 of this article, I explained the basic steps to move your application from a single server to a scalable solution for both PHP and MySQL. While most Web applications will never need to expand beyond the concepts presented in that article, eventually you may find yourself in a situation where the basic steps aren’t enough. Here are some more advanced topics on how you might change your setup to support additional throughput, isolate "concerns" better, and take your scalability to the next level.

He starts with a look at database pooling and how it can not only help you on load balancing your application's resources but also in the caching of the requests. Different resources give different cache results and grouping those together makes life simpler (and faster) for your application. He also talks a a bit about sharding - vertical, manual horizontal and application level techniques.

The Oracle Technology Network has posted the first article in a series by Eli White looking at building a scalable PHP/MySQL web application.

Hopefully the most important lesson you can learn here is to understand what you will need to do to scale in the future. By knowing this, you can do only what you need at each phase of your project without "coding yourself into a corner", ending up in a situation where it's hard to take the next scalability step. [...] In this two-part article I will share some of the lessons learned, and take you step by step through a standard process of scaling your application.

He touches on a few different topics in this first part of the series - performance vs scalability, tuning your PHP installation and database load balancing through master/slave replication.

Josh Holmes, just coming off of presenting at OpenCa.mp in Dallas, has posted his entire presentation to his blog for anyone that missed it and wants to catch up. He spoke about scaling WordPress on the Windows platform. He also includes a lot of content in the post that he wasn't able to get to during the presentation.

Now, on to my session itself. This was a fun session. I only had 30 minutes and I had about 3 hours of material so I've got a ton of stuff in these notes that I didn't cover in the session itself. The session is a take off a session that I did at MODxpo back in the spring. The talk itself is about 3-5 minutes of slides and the rest is all demos.

If you're looking for the actual slides, they're over on slideshare, but the real content - including the demos (and screenshots of them) are included. He talks about the Windows Platform Installer, the WinCache library and Windows Azure Data Storage.

Brandon Savage has a few recommendations when it comes to taking your application to the next level - scaling it up to meet the needs of the masses using your application every day.

The modern age has brought us lots of new ways to take a growing site and scale it. From Amazon Web Services to cloud computing and grid computing, to Mosso and Akamai, there are lots of options we should consider. This article won't make a recommendation as to which you should pick; it will simply discuss what each service has to offer and leave it up to you.

He suggests four different alternatives to pick from when making the move up - the old standby of purchasing more hardware, making use of the Amazone Web Services, using a "cloud" like Mosso or implementing a Content Delivery Network to lighten the load and spread it out across a wider range of servers.