RightScale and Zend Deliver Platform as a Service for PHP

RightScale and Zend Technologies jointly developed a solution for deploying and managing PHP applications with high availability, elasticity and portability in the cloud.

RightScale, which focuses on cloud-computing management, and Zend, the PHP company, announced their new RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack, which provides a preconfigured open PAAS (platform as a service) architecture for faster cloud on-boarding while maintaining the ability to customize and control the cloud environment.

The RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack combines the RightScale Cloud Management Platform with the Zend PHP architecture powered by Zend Server, delivering a production-ready solution for instantly provisioning a preconfigured, clustered PHP environment that scales dynamically while ensuring high availability. Now enterprises can take advantage of a pre-configured, three-tier HA (high-availability) architecture for a faster on-ramp to cloud deployment while retaining full control of the architecture and freedom to choose among a variety of target cloud resource pools.

The RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack comes bundled with RightScale premium on-boarding—a step-by-step path to deploying on the cloud—which helps customers get started quickly while following best practices developed jointly by RightScale and Zend.

“Through our partnership with RightScale, we enable customers to take full advantage of the cloud,” Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend, said in a statement. “With the new solution, customers can benefit from the agility and elasticity offered by the cloud, while using Zend’s proven, enterprise-grade PHP runtime environment in production.”

“Considering PHP's ubiquity on the Web, it wasn't a question of if it embraced the cloud, but when,” Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk, said in a statement. “With the recently announced RightScale/Zend partnership, the two companies are offering PHP users the best of both worlds, with the time to market of platform as a service and the flexibility of infrastructure as a service.”

The RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack features the preconfigured Zend PHP architecture to speed time to market; auto-scaling based on system and application load metrics, supported by load balancing; PHP session clustering for high availability; redundant database with failover and recovery; system, server and application-level monitoring, alerting and diagnostics; and cloud portability.

The companies said the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack is a natural evolution in the partnership between RightScale and Zend that began with the RightScale Development and Test Solution Pack introduced in 2010. The Development and Test Solution Pack allows developers and testers to provision a complete, pre-integrated Zend PHP environment through RightScale’s self-service portal, streamlining application development and testing processes, the companies said.

"The popularity of PHP is clear, with one-third of the Web running PHP and PHP being used by enterprises like GE, NYSE Euronext, AT&T and Bank of America as well as social networks such as Facebook and Yahoo,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale.  “At RightScale, more than 35 percent of our customers are running PHP, so we believe this latest solution pack from RightScale and Zend addresses a timely and important need.”