Andi Gutmans has a new post to his site about a recent update to the offerings on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) - it now offers Zend Server 6 as an installable option.

Zend Server 6 is the ideal application platform for mobile and web applications, and this version brings a new level of enterprise capabilities. [...] Today, I'm also pleased to share that this newest version of Zend Server is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Now, for one combined fee with Amazon Web Services, you can run your applications on a fully supported PHP application platform with Zend Server 6 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Linux.

If you're interested in what Zend Server has to offer, check out the product page on the Zend website. Zend Server handles a lot of the base level things for you and can help you get up and running quickly. It includes things like detailed monitoring, error tracking, code tracing and a nice UI to for management and configuration of the server.

The Amazon Web Services group has recently released an updated version of their SDK for PHP and at it's heart is the open source project Guzzle (a HTTP client framework).

The new SDK is built on top of the Guzzle HTTP client framework, which provides increased performance and enables event-driven customization. Each AWS service client extends the Guzzle client and describes operations on the service using a service description file. The SDK now manages persistent connections for both serial and parallel requests. It detects transient network failures, with automatic retries using truncated exponential backoff. Support for event hooks (via the Symfony2 EventDispatcher) allows you to implement custom, event-driven behavior.

In the AWS post about the update, they give you a few code snippets showing this updated version in use. This completely reworked version of the SDK is not compatible with the previous version, so you'll need to consult their migration guide to bring things up to date.

On the "A Cloudy Place" blog there's a recent post about the steps the author ( Shameer) to to get PHP and Git set up on the Elastic Beanstalk service from Amazon.

When Amazon announced Beanstalk's support for PHP I was curious to know what it would look like. So I decided to give it a try. I hadn't used my AWS account for a while, so I had to do some account setup tasks, configuring command line tools, etc. In this article I will explain how to set up a PHP application in Beanstalk from scratch.

He walks you through the entire process (complete with some screenshots) of getting the command line tools set up, creating your first PHP application and connecting it to your git repository. There's no database instructions included because the default EC2 instance doesn't include them. You'll need to refer to these instructions if you need that for your application.

SitePoint's PHPMaster has a new post today, the third part of a series helping you get your application from "zero to cloud" on an Amazon EC2 setup. In this latest post they wrap things up by showing how to set up the full lamp stack on the remote server. Here's part one and two that lead up to this latest part.

This is the final article in a three part series focused on setting up EC2 as a sandbox for application developers. I assume you have an AWS account with Amazon; if you don't, please read Part 1 to learn how easy it is to sign up. I also assume you have configured your development environment and installed an AMI; if you haven't, please read Part 2. In this installment, we'll learn how to install Apache, MySQL and PHP in our running AMI, and then clone the AMI to make our own.

Included in the post are all the commands you'll need to get the packages installed for PHP, MySQL, Apache 2, PEAR and the PHP command line binary. With all of that installed, they show you how to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to make it easier to scale in the future.

On NetTuts.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to deploy your WordPress blog to the cloud, more specifically to the cloud services Amazon offers.

For the last decade, hosting a large scale web application has been a daunting task, reserved only for experts. Not anymore; when Amazon opened its server architecture, everything changed. Computer hardware moved to the cloud, and became available to any and all developers. In this tutorial, we will install WordPress in the cloud.

They walk you through all the steps you'll need - from setting up an AWS account, starting up your first instance and installing the needed server software. It comes complete with screenshots. They also show you how to set up the database and how to pull down the latest WordPress and configure it for use.

Christoph Dorn has a new post today showing how to get the FirePHP tool to work together with Zend Server on an AWS instance to help make your debugging even simpler.

FirePHP can nicely complement the built-in tools available when using Zend Server and can be easily made available to all provisioned sites. This tutorial illustrates how to setup FirePHP 1.0 for all virtual hosts on a Zend Server AMI on Amazon EC2.

He steps you through the process of getting FirePHP installed and working in your browser as well as pulling the "firephp.phar" file in on the Zend Server side. Configuration is pretty simple - the lines for the Apache config are included and the JSON needed to make the credentials for FirePHP are too. A simple test script is created and an auth key is set and you should be up and running.

On his blog today Kevin Schroeder has a quick post about an issue with the queue name when working with the Amazon SQS service.

I'm doing some work for a webinar and I figured out that if you want use AWS SQS in your app you need to specify not just the queue name, but the full URL. What is the full URL? It is what createQueue() returns.

His code example shows a "before" and "after" of using the createQueue method to make the correct queue name. You can find out more about the Amazon Simple Queue Service on the Amazon website. Additionally there's a PHP library to interface with it posted on the Amazon Web Services site.

On the Amazon Web Services blog there's a new post about the release of their new AWS SDK for PHP that use can use to directly access their web services features from your PHP applications.

The first release supports a large subset of our infrastructure services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SimpleDB, the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), as well as Amazon Identify and Access Management (IAM).

The SDK for PHP includes all of the libraries you'll need to directly access the mentioned services, some code examples to help you get started and some documentation to fill you in on some of the finer points. There's also a few code snippets included in the post to show you a sample SNS connection that creates a topic, subscribes to it and publishes a notification.

On the Amazon Web Services site a new article from Clay Loveless has been posted - an Introduction to the Amazon Web Services for PHP developers.

All of these services are available via both REST and SOAP interfaces. (We'll touch on both in this article, but we'll concentrate on the REST and REST-like Query approaches. ) A growing number of language specific toolkits are available for these services, so you can feel comfortable basing an architecture on AWS given its language-agnostic foundation. If you start off building a business around AWS using Ruby and decide to switch to PHP, there will be nothing stopping you.

He includes code to ensure you can even connect (a compatibility script) and a link to the files you'll need to work through the tutorial. He shows how to create the connection to the AWS backend, launch the local server and building a simple video sharing site.

Brandon Savage has a few recommendations when it comes to taking your application to the next level - scaling it up to meet the needs of the masses using your application every day.

The modern age has brought us lots of new ways to take a growing site and scale it. From Amazon Web Services to cloud computing and grid computing, to Mosso and Akamai, there are lots of options we should consider. This article won't make a recommendation as to which you should pick; it will simply discuss what each service has to offer and leave it up to you.

He suggests four different alternatives to pick from when making the move up - the old standby of purchasing more hardware, making use of the Amazone Web Services, using a "cloud" like Mosso or implementing a Content Delivery Network to lighten the load and spread it out across a wider range of servers.