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Zend, the PHP company, announced it is making its PHP application platform available as a cloud service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) through AWS Marketplace.
Zend officials said running PHP on the AWS Cloud, backed by one of the largest development communities, will give developers the advantage of the cloud. The offering on AWS empowers application developers to develop better applications faster, deploy them continuously and scale them as needed.
With Zend on AWS, developers can start PHP application projects easily, without capital investment, and evolve them to efficient multi-team, multi-server projects with full automation of all steps of the application development life cycle. This platform enables Agile development at scale, helping companies deliver innovation faster.
“Today’s businesses must deliver quality applications efficiently and effectively to innovate and succeed, and much of that developer innovation is taking place in the cloud,” Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend, said in a statement. “The Zend on AWS is a game-changer, making PHP developers successful in the very place where disruptive innovation is happening – the cloud. Our work with Amazon creates a cloud and mobile-friendly developer ecosystem that gives these developers the ammunition they need to create the quality, forward-looking applications businesses require to survive and thrive.”
Key to the Zend app platform is the recently released Zend Server 7, which features Z-Ray. Z-Ray is a tool that provides in-context visibility inside apps by showing in real time exactly what happens to construct each page. It helps developers write better code, detect and fix issues earlier, and collaborate with operations staff to resolve production problems faster. The tool gives developers deep insight into how their code is running as they are developing it—all without having to change any of their habits or workflow. This helps them write better code, detect issues earlier, and fix them before their work is integrated and deployed.
“Z-Ray is a bar that is injected into the bottom of your page showing lots of useful information,” Rob Allen, a PHP and Zend Framework expert based in Worcester, U.K., said in a blog post. “All in all, I’m liking this functionality a lot! Instant access to all this data without having to touch any of my own source code is very, very useful.”
Moreover, with Zend Server 7, development managers gain from the visibility, reliability of the release processes, and the ease with which they can scale teams, processes and production environments.
“We’ve bet our business on AWS—their cloud platform is the very definition of ‘business critical’ for us,” said Bryan “BJ” Hoffpauir, chief architect of Comit Developers, in a statement. “Zend’s best-of-breed technologies and world-class business development teams offer Comit the ability to manage our customer’s Websites far more efficiently and deliver an exceptional customer experience. With Zend Server 7’s latest features, like Z-Ray, work that used to take our engineering teams hours to accomplish can now be completed in minutes.”
Terry Hanold, vice president of cloud commerce at AWS, said IT executives will appreciate the breadth of AWS services, and the availability of a broad developer, partner and application ecosystem for Zend on AWS. Enabling one-click access to an integrated PHP application platform for developers on AWS is good for both PHP developers and AWS, Hanold said. “Zend Server 7 on AWS Marketplace offers developers even more tools to build quality, scalable applications quickly on the AWS Cloud,” he said.
Zend Server 7 is available on AWS Marketplace in three editions: Developer, Professional and Enterprise. The Developer Edition is designed for building and testing applications, with special developer features and very affordable pricing. The Professional and Enterprise Editions are packaged for production environments, with the Enterprise Edition providing the highest service level agreements (SLAs) and enterprise-class performance features.
All three editions of Zend Server 7 on AWS Marketplace are available for 30 days free of charge for the software (AWS usage fees apply). After that, the Developer Edition on AWS is $0.03/hr for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) up to m1.medium instance types. Pricing for the Professional and Enterprise Editions starts at $0.04 per hour and $0.06 per hour, respectively.
Zend Server 7 is available on more than 15 AMI types, ranging from micro-instances all the way to extra-large virtual servers optimized for compute-intensive workloads, Zend said.