When thinking about moving your PHP application to PaaS (if it's bluemix, heroku or others), you should take into account several architectural differences that will affect your application. This presentation is a good place to start your migration plan to PaaS.

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Confidential - © All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.
PHP Challenges on PaaS
Boaz Ziniman
Sr. Director of Technology and Cloud Infrastructure
Zend Technologies

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About me
• Working @Zend for the last 8 years
• Managing Zend’s Cloud initiatives (andfew other roles...)
• Years of web applications development and operations
Find me @:
boaz.z@zend.com
@ziniman
http://ziniman.com

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Bluemix and PaaS 101

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Bluemix and PaaS 101
• App is Runtime + PHP Code. Will be distributed across DEAs
• Droplet -App blueprint stored in CF
• Cloud Controller in charge of Starting/Stopping/ScalingApps (with Health Manager)
• New droplet is createdon every Push

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Why PaaS is different
• You only care about the Application
– No SSH! No SSH! No SSH! …. …. No SSH!
– No need to deal with OS, Webserver, file system, etc.
– No networking (that you can control)
• Ephemeral file system
• Monitoring to ensure application uptime
• Fast and transparent scale up and down
• Restart / Redeployment can (and will) happen anytime

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PHP Challenges on PaaS – File System
• Ephemeral filesystem
– Local storage will be gone on every push/restart
– You should not store locally
• User generatedcontent
• Configuration
– No Sync/Sharing between instances in cluster mode
• Solutions
– Make everything part of your app (including configuration)
– Use DB to store shared data/configurations
– Use Environment Variables to store data
– Use storage as a service - For example AWS S3

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PHP Challenges on PaaS – Services
• Services are your best friends
• Everything is a service from MySQL to SMTP
• “Outsourcing” approach
• DB as a service - ClearDB, RDS … for MySQL
• Memcached as a service - Caching and Sessions store
• Key/Value store as a service – Redis, Cloudant …
• Logs as a service – Splunk Storm/Cloud, Loggly …
• ConsumeAPIs and Services as data sources
– Let others provide the service you need

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PHP Challenges on PaaS – Tips
• Take network latency into account
– Cache as much as possible
– Reduce calls to DB
• Use manifests to define your application
• Store data in PaaS (not PHP) Environment Variables
– Easy to access in code
– Survives restarts

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http://12factor.net/
1. Codebase
One codebase tracked in revision control, many
deploys
2. Dependencies
Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
3. Config
Store config in the environment
4. Backing Services
Treat backing services as attached resources
5. Build, release, run
Strictly separate build and run stages
6. Processes
Execute the app as one or more stateless
processes
7. Port binding
Export services via port binding
8. Concurrency
Scale out via the process model
9. Disposability
Maximize robustness with fast startup and
graceful shutdown.
10. Dev/prod parity
Keep development, staging, and production as
similar as possible
11. Logs
Treat logs as event streams
12. Admin processes
Run admin/management tasks as one-off
processes

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Thank You!
boaz.z@zend.com