Maarten begins by bringing any latecomers up to speed with the current cloud-computing phenomenon. After detailing some of the benefits, such as the massive scope for resources that clouds can provide, Maarten introduces us to Microsoft’s Windows Azure. This PaaS cloud platform, based on virtual machines and aiming at scalability and reliability, will let you have multiple instances running with the simple change of a configuration value.
Without getting too technical, Maarten will step you through developing PHP applications on the Azure platform. By the end of the tutorial, you’ll learn how straightforward (and scalable) hosting PHP applications in a cloud environment can be.
You still pay for what you use but it’s just on a monthly basis now. The main addition is that our replication ensures you will never go down. There’s always a mirrored server ready to handle your data
Cloud Servers are certainly an interesting prospect but I don’t think I’d go with a Paas solution. I don’t mind that the operating system and such would be managed but I think Paas takes the control a level too far for my own liking. Iaas looks to be more reasonable in that respect.
Though I thought part of the point of Cloud servers was the flexibility of only paying for what you use and not worrying about it going down if demand increases. Confusingly having set packages like the Servage one above seems to contradict that idea.
Plus I’ve had some pretty bad experiences with servage in the past (low resources) so on a personal note it’s very unlikely I’d use them again lol.
Interesting, I guess if I need to use .NET services with the PHP COM object I would use Windows platform hosting for PHP, other than that I can’t see the need.
The thing with Azure that a dedicated server can’t give you is elastic scalability. If you are a web shop that for example serviced clients who did events or a movie studio releasing a movie and needed a fan site that showed trailers. Having elastic scale where you don’t have to physically add servers to handle load is attractive.
I think the idea is that Windows Azure is one of the really top notch clouds that are up and running at production quality right now, and for those looking for a PaaS, Azure is a good way for PHP folks to get their heads in the cloud.
However, I agree with premise that this is basically pitched to a pretty thin slice of the development community.
I think this is quite cool… I’m an multi-source developer… I don’t use a Windows workstation anymore (unless I virtualize it for VS) and far from hating MS, I appreciate a lot of what MS does.
This is a great article for introducing non-MS techies to some really neat technology and precisely along the lines of Microsoft’s present philosophy with PHP developers. I think the folks in Redmond understand that there are tens of millions of PHP developers in the wild and they’d like those developers writing code for an MS Platform with an MS data source.
I think I’ll give Azure a spin with PHP when I take some time off in August. Thanks for the article!
Why did you (again) omit using ASP.NET for this article? How many PHP developers would use the Microsoft Platform, as almost all open-source developers HATE M$ ? Compared to how many ASP.NET developers could have benifited from this information? Complete, utter nonsense.