Andrew Kenney's presentation at Boston Startup School.

1. PHP in the Cloud
The Future of the Glue of the Internet

2. About Me
• Andrew Kenney
• VP, Cloud Engineering @ Acquia
• Previously President/CTO @ ONEsite
@syrneus - purefire@gmail.com - andrew.kenney@acquia.com
purefire.com - linkedin.com/akenney - github.com/syrneus

3. Glue of the Internet
• “PHP is glue. It is the glue used to build
cool web applications by sticking dozens
of 3rd-party libraries together and making
it all appear as one coherent entity…”
~PHP.net

4. PHP in a Nutshell
• “I don't know how to stop it, there was
never any intent to write a programming
language” ~ Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of
PHP

5. How did PHP get so big?
• PHP replaced Perl as the lingua franca of
the web
• PHP.net had great examples and
comments
• Google did not exist
• StackOverflow did not exist

6. PHP’s History
• 1995 – First Release
• 1998 – PHP 3
• 2000 – PHP 4 / Zend Engine I
• 2004 – PHP 5 / Zend Engine II
• 2009 – PHP 5.3
• PHP 6 - ???

7. PHP has a lot of competition…
Top Languages on GitHub

8. Why use PHP now?
• Powers the majority of the known web
• Installed everywhere
• Proven scalability
• Large developer community
• Great frameworks

9. Who Uses PHP?
• Facebook
• Wikipedia
• Yahoo / Flickr
• White House
• WordPress.com
• Tumblr
• Most large Internet forums
• etc.

10. Who uses PHP? Acquia!
• Thousands of PHP servers on
Amazon Cloud
• Billions of monthly pageviews
• Tens of thousands of Drupal sites
• Hosting some of the largest
Drupal sites in the world

11. PHP CMS Projects
• Popular CMSes
– Drupal
– Joomla
– WordPress
• Easier than ever to build a site
• Drupal 8 is going to be amazing…

12. PHP Frameworks
• Zend Framework (ZF2)
• Symfony
• FuelPHP / Yii / CodeIgniter / CakePHP
• You’re not a real PHP programmer until
you’ve created your own framework

13. PHP Stack
• PHP - PHP 5.3+
– Memcache – use it (or use Redis)
– APC
• Web Server
– Apache / Nginx / etc.
• Database
– MySQL / Postgres / etc.
• Operating System
– Ubuntu / Red Hat / etc.

14. PHP in the Cloud
• It is easy to run a PHP site in the cloud
• It is HARD to run a PHP site in the cloud
with…
– High availability
– High scalability
– High security

15. PHP Cloud Hosting
• IaaS
– Amazon Web Services
– Rackspace Cloud
• PaaS
– PaaS: PHPfog / AppFog / PagodaBox /
Heroku
– Drupal Cloud: Acquia Cloud / Pantheon
• Traditional Hosting
– Linode / Rackspace / etc.

16. Setting up simple LAMP stack

17. Complicated Cloud LAMP Stack
Availability Zone A Availability Zone B Availability Zone A Availability Zone B
BAL
BAL
BAL
BAL
Varnish Varnish Varnish Varnish
nginx nginx nginx nginx
WEB
WEB
WEB
WEB
Memcache Memcache Memcache Memcache
APACHE APACHE APACHE APACHE
Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal
User User User User
via via via via
Files Git/SVN Files Git/SVN Files Git/SVN Files Git/SVN
FSDB
FSDB
FSDB
FSDB
User Files User Files User Files User Files
GlusterFS GlusterFS GlusterFS GlusterFS
Multiregion
Replication
MySQL MySQL MySQL MySQL
Site A Site A Site A Site A
Site B Site B
Sites C/D Sites C & D
Acquia Confidential

18. Use a PaaS for your Startup
PagodaBox
AppFog
Acquia Cloud

19. PagodaBox Symfony Demo
Create a free account on www.pagodabox.com
Download simple site at github.com/syrneus/phpinthecloud

20. PagodaBox Symfony Demo
Name your new application and launch it

21. PagodaBox Symfony Demo
Setup your SSH keys so you can easily git push changes

22. PagodaBox Symfony Demo
Navigate to your code on the filesystem and
push your website live!

23. PagodaBox Symfony Demo

24. PagodaBox Symfony Demo

25. Drawception – Symfony at Scale
• Everything available as an API • Doctrine ORM
• Twig template engine powered • Hosted on PagodaBox
HTML / mobile / Facebook views

26. PHP – Lessons Learned
• Use a framework
• Don’t over engineer scalability
• Use an ORM
• Use UTC server time
• Use a template language (even if it is PHP)
• Plan for internationalization from the beginning
• Use UTF-8 for your Databases
• Version control APIs

27. Why use PHP for a Startup?
• Trusted by some of the largest web
companies in the world
• Amazing pool of developer talent
• PHP will not be your bottleneck in
scalability
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Also use PHP/
Drupal for elements of your startup like the
website/blog/community/etc.

28. Acquia - PHP @ Scale

29. Questions?
• Tweet Me: @syrneus
• E-mail Me: purefire@gmail.com
@syrneus - purefire@gmail.com - andrew.kenney@acquia.com
purefire.com - linkedin.com/akenney - github.com/syrneus
Ask me about Acquia!