Following up on his article about getting SQL Azure working with PHP on Azure, Brian Swan has posted a new article in the series, a look at getting PHP itself running on an Azure platform.

In my last post I described how to access SQL Azure from PHP, but I described how to do this when PHP was running on my local server. In other words, I only described how to leverage half the cloud. In this post, I'll leverage the other half of the cloud by describing how to run PHP in Windows Azure.

You'll already need to have a Windows Azure subscription and a copy of the Azure SDK before getting started. With these in hand you can get started building the two packages you'll need to push to the Azure instance - one with the PHP binaries and the other a service definition file. He walks you through creating the application (screenshots), making the definition file and building the package to deploy. If all goes well, clicking on the "Deploy" button in your hosted service control panel should get you all set up.