http://www.egeniq.cominfo@egeniq.com

@egeniq

February 2011Ivo Jansch

PHP Development In The Cloud

Contents

WARNING

This is not Yet Another “Store files on Amazon S3” talk.

2

What is the Cloud?

3

What is the Cloud?

4

Gartner’s Hype Cycle

5

Gartner’s Hype Cycle

6

Gartner’s Hype Cycle on Clouds

7

Clouds According to NIST

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with

minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four

deployment models.”

National Institute of Standards and Technology

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/

8

NIST: Five Characteristics

Things that are considered cloud:

‣ On-demand, self-service

‣ Broad network access

‣ Resource pooling

‣ Rapid elasticity

‣ Measured service

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NIST: Three Service Models

Cloud applications are:

‣ Software as a Service

‣ Platform as a Service

‣ Infrastructure as a Service

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NIST: Four Deployment Models

‣ Private cloud

‣ Community cloud

‣ Public cloud

‣ Hybrid cloud

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Infrastructure as a Service

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Standard layers in a typical application:

Application Layers

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Network

Hardware

Operating System

Storage

System Software

Application

Infrastructure as a Service

Parts of the infrastructure offered as service to your app:

14

Network

Hardware

Operating System

Storage

System Software

Application

Infrastructure as a Service

‣ Pitfalls:• Vendor lock-in

• Security

• Integrity of the service provider

‣ Advantages:• Easily scalable

• Move from capital expense to operational expense

• Metered use

• Don’t worry about hardware...

15

Infrastructure as a Service

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The Hardware/OS Layer

‣ Typically offered as Virtual Machine images

‣ Gives ‘throw hardware at the problem’ a new dimension

‣ Elastic load balancing divides traffic over instances

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Example: The Rackspace Cloud

‣ The RackspaceCloud is what used to be called Mosso

‣ Powerful API for managing your cloud

‣ Easy access in PHP through Aleksey Korzun’s PHP API:• http://github.com/AlekseyKorzun/php-cloudservers

‣ Concepts• Images (various operating systems)

• Flavors (configuration: mem, cpu, disk)

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The Rackspace Cloud in PHP

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The Rackspace Cloud in PHP

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Clouds for Development

‣Private Cloud:• Flexible development environments• Easy to simulate large scale environments• Easy to set up multiple clusters

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Example: Terremark’s Infinicloud

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Terremark’s InfiniCloud

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IaaS Architecture Prepare your app to run on IaaS

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Horizontal Scalability

‣ If you run your app on multiple servers today, would it work?

‣ Typical problem areas:• Sessions

• Files

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Horizontal Scalability

‣ Danga - http://www.danga.com/• People behind LiveJournal / SixApart

• Creators of tools to help make software horizontally scalable

• Memcache - distributed caching, session clustering‣ http://github.com/andreiz/php-memcached

• MogileFS - distributed file storage‣ http://projects.usrportage.de/index.fcgi/php-mogilefs

• Gearman - distributed parallel job processing / message queue‣ http://pecl.php.net/package/gearman/

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Elasticity

‣ Fewer bottlenecks• More elasticity

• Easier to scale

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Elasticity

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Elasticity

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Abstraction

‣ Abstract services where possible

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Abstraction

‣ Con:• Common denominator functionality

• Adds some overhead

‣ Pro:• Reduce vendor lock-in

• Increase flexibility

• Save development time

• No need to learn different APIs

• Promotes competition between providers

31

Abstraction

‣ Zend’s SimpleCloud• http://simplecloud.org

• Good attempt at generic cloud abstraction

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Characteristics Of Your Application

‣ Service oriented

‣ Stateless

‣ Low coupling

‣ Modularity

‣ Interoperability

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Infra as a Service = SLA Hell?

‣ Find out service levels of infrastructure components

‣ Get proper support

‣ Create “What if...” scenarios• What if Amazon is down?

• What if SupaDupaCloudStore goes bankrupt?

‣ Who owns the data?

‣ Pay attention to license agreements

34

Platform as a Service

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Complete platform offered as a service:

Platform as a Service

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Network

Hardware

Operating System

Storage

System Software

Application

Platform as a Service

‣ Platform scales up and down as necessary

‣ Same pitfalls and advantages as IaaS, plus:• Don’t worry about scalability

37

Platform as a Service

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Google AppEngine

‣ http://code.google.com/appengine/

‣ Python and Java

‣ Able to run PHP via Quercus (Java PHP interpreter)• http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-app-engine/

• http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/

‣ Technology needs to prove itself• Example sites running on Quercus:‣ http://www.webmonkey.com/

‣ http://www.style.com/stylefile/

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The Rackspace Cloud ‘Sites’

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Rackspace’s TrueHybrid

‣ Platform selects the best operating system for your site

‣ Magically blends Windows and Linux, ASP.NET and PHP

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Other Platforms for PHP

‣ NING• http://ning.com

• Social Network PaaS

‣ Force.com• Salesforce cloud platform

• Business applications

‣ PHPFog• http://phpfog.com

• Cloud platform for PHP apps

• Quite young, looks very promising

42

Software as a Service

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Software as a Service

Everything in the cloud:

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Network

Hardware

Operating System

Storage

System Software

Application

Software as a Service

‣ Complete applications or application components

‣ Popular phrase: “We are moving our ... to the cloud”

‣ Examples:• Gmail

• Google Apps (office apps, calendar, email)

• Salesforce for CRM

‣ Often built on IaaS• Dropbox file sharing (makes use of Amazon S3 for storage)

• Jungledisk backups (same)

45

Software as a Service

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Example: Salesforce

‣ Gives access to all your data in Salesforce using SOAP

‣ PHP library available

‣ Documentation abundant• http://developer.force.com/

‣ Salesforce was SaaS way before term ‘cloud’ was coined

‣ Most developer friendly SaaS• Documentation

• Sandbox functionality (paid)

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Example: Salesforce

48

Source adapted from tutorial at http://www.mikesimonds.com

Example: Google Apps

‣ Many features available through Zend_Gdata_* in ZF• Information retrieval

• Document storage

• Calendering

• Account Configuration

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Example: Google Apps

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General SaaS suggestions

‣ Want to work with X from PHP?• Google ‘X php api’ or ‘X php tutorial’

• You’re almost never the first to want to work with it

‣ Cloud apps are easier to work with than most desktop/noncloud apps.

‣ Testing• You don’t want to jeopardize your production data

• See if there is a sandbox feature (Salesforce has one)

• If not, create test accounts

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The ‘Warcraft Effect’

Clouds are living entities that change when you’re not looking

52

Creating SaaS

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Creating SaaS

‣ In 2 years Cloud Infrastructure will be a commodity• It’ll be all about application development

‣ Building an application for multiple users/customers

‣ Things to pay attention to:• Reliability (one customer getting in the way of another)

• Security (competitors seeing each other’s data)

• Deployment

• Maintenance

54

Multi-Tenancy evolution

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479069.aspx

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Multi-tenant Databases

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Multi-tenant Databases

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Things to think about

‣ Privacy

‣ Shared data

‣ Collaboration

‣ Interoperability

‣ Vendor lock

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Putting it all togetherCloud Computing In Practice

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A Hybrid IT Cloud

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A Hybrid IT Cloud

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SummaryIf you were sleeping, wake up now!

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Summary

‣What is the Cloud?

• The cloud = IaaS + PaaS + SaaS

‣ If you have trouble remembering:

• Cloud = Platform, Infrastructure & Software as a Service

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Summary

‣ With your next PHP application:• See if you can run it on a Cloud Platform

• See if you can run parts on Cloud Infrastructure

• See if you can use Software as a Service components

• See if you can offer it as a service

• Keep your architecture ‘cloud ready’

‣ Think about clouds!• In a couple of years, we’ll all be doing it

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Food for ThoughtLet’s leave you with something to think about

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Food for Thought

Are you worried about this?

66

Cloud

Where’s my data?!

Cloud Provider

Food for Thought

Then what about this?

67

Financial System

Where’s my money?!

Bank

Our money has been in the cloud since the 18th century!

Thank you! Questions?

http://www.egeniq.cominfo@egeniq.com

@egeniq

http://www.egeniq.comivo@egeniq.com

@ijansch

Credits

Pictures used (under Creative Commons Attribution licenses)

Cloud (slide 3): http://flickr.com/photos/kables/6324973/

Cat + harddisk: http://flickr.com/photos/sirmildredpierce/42928070/ (adapted)

Rubber Band Man: http://flickr.com/photos/thenovys/3791884189/

Clipart used (royalty free and public domain)

http://www.clker.com/