You've watched RailsCasts, you've watched ZendCasts - but what about screencasts for PHP Cloud Development techniques? Well, we were surprised to find that there was nothing, yet, available to satisfy that need. There's cloud development casts for .Net developers and presumably for Java developers as well. But not much in the PHP space. So we decided to commit to the project and make it happen.

The shows will be about 10 to 20 minutes in length and will cover topics relevant to developing applications on cloud-based servers. They're still working on some of the first shows, but you can voice your opinions about what you'd like to hear about by commenting on commenting on this post.

For the past 10 years, the LAMP stack has laid waste to proprietary software stacks. Yes, Microsoft has held onto gargantuan profits, but LAMP has become the foundation for leading web services, whether Google or Facebook or [Insert Big Web Brand Here]. LAMP is the future. Or was. That is, until cloud killed it, as Eucalyptus CEO (and former MySQL CEO) Marten Mickos posits in a great keynote from the Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2012.

In the keynote he pointed out that it's becoming less about the whole setup and more about combining technologies to get the results you need - less "stack" and more "linked technology" (and not always the same tech for every node). He pointed to the Amazon AWS service as a prime example of a platform that allows endless flexibility as to what software can be installed and how it can be used, all with a few clicks of a mouse.

This article will walk you through cloud hosting for your PHP application with Pagoda Box. It'll detail how to handle PHP dependencies, get your MySQL databases up and running (and debug locally), and customise various aspects of PHP with ease.

He walks you through the entire process you'll need to fire up a (free) application on their service (including a database!):

• Sign up for a new account
• Create an application
• Set up git
• Create your public SSH key and upload it to Pagoda
• Commit to your repository and deploy your code

He also mentions a custom option Pagoda Box has included in their series - the Boxfile. This configuration file allows you to set up things like the environment you want your app to run in (PHP 5.3, MySQLi extension, etc) and set up some of the php.ini configuration settings. He also shows you how to set up the database instance and how to use their "pagoda" gem to create a temporary SSH tunnel from your development environment to their database server. He also briefly mentions the option they have of using a real domain name to point to your application.

We at php|architect want to honor those who give of themselves so that we can work with PHP and in this great ecosystem. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and want to pause to say thank you. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of March and is open to all php|architect subscribers.

The categories for this year's event are "Up & Coming", "Best Cloud Platform" and "Best PHP Application Platform". Nominees across all of the categories include Joind.in, PintLabs, AppFog, Pagoda Box Drupal 7 and SugarCRM. If you're a subscriber, get in there and vote for your favorites!

In this article I'm going to show you how to create a free Amazon EC2 cloud based LAMP Server and Point your domain to Amazon EC2 Instance. There are 4 simple steps to do.

The setup process is pretty easy - getting an Amazon free account, creating a server from an existing image, installing the LAMP stack and pointing your domain at the EC2 instance. He gives a step-by-step guide of the process, including the commands you'll need to execute to get all of the LAMP packages installed.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a series of blog posts on how to connect to the Zend Developer cloud with various IDEs. Except one that I missed... PDT. The deployment plugin is already installed in PDT 3 and so you already will have the ability to push to the DevCloud instance.

The process is pretty simple thanks to that plugin - just create the project (or use an existing one), set up a new target for deployment then launch and deploy the PHP application directly. You can find out more about the "PHP Development Tools" on its Eclipse project site.

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling

Connecting with the Zend DevCloud in Linux is actually quite easy if you know how to use SFTP. [...] But, as I said in a previous post, I hate having to do command line stuff for each and every file or commit. I like things to work seamlessly. So what I did was write a PHP script that connects to the DevCloud (or any SSH-based endpoint for that matter) and then monitors all of the files and directories for changes, such as a creation, modification or deletion event.

His script (available on github) uses the PECL inotify package to work, but once its set up, you can have the PHP process running the script in the background, pointed at your web root, and have it upload automatically.

Getting NetBeans connected to the Zend Developer Cloud is actually pretty simple… if you have NetBeans 7.1 which is currently in RC. NetBeans 7.0 has a bug that won't allow you to connect to Git over HTTPS. NetBeans 7.1 fixes that issue. You will also need to make sure that you have the Git module installed.

His post includes the step by step process (including some screenshots to getting the automated deployment set up and working in this popular IDE. The key is setting up the SFTP connection to point to the right location on the cloud server (the path isn't very intuitive, he recommends finding it with another SFTP program for the initial setup).

Just because you want to use the Zend Developer Cloud at phpcloud.com doesn't mean that you necessarily use Zend Studio. While I may wonder why you don't use Zend Studio ( :-) ) I know there are a lot of other good IDE's on the market and an IDE like PHPStorm might suit how you do your development.

He walks you through the whole process, complete with screenshots - creating the project on phpcloud, cloning your git repo there, configure PHPStorm for deployment (via SFTP) and set up a little path mapping.