Zend Technologies has teamed up with cloud-computing management developer RightScale to make it possible for development teams to deliver PHP applications faster by leveraging Zend Server through RightScale's cloud management platform.

To enable this, RightScale has launched the RightScale Development and Test Solution Pack -- a cloud management solution designed to help software development and testing teams more easily provision and use cloud computing resources to improve software quality and speed time-to-market.

The PHP stack in the RightScale Development and Test Solution Pack will include Zend Server, Zend's cloud-ready PHP application stack, which comprises PHP, Zend Framework, extensions and drivers, as well as a host of features that help developers run, debug and optimize their PHP applications.

The new offering addresses the need of IT organizations to reduce the time, hassle and risk associated with managing multiple development and test environments. Developers and testers can now quickly and easily provision a complete PHP cloud-based environment based on Zend Server using RightScale's self-service portal. Developers use the Zend Studio IDE to build their applications locally, leverage Zend Framework components to access a variety of cloud services, and debug their applications on a Zend Server instance running in the cloud.

"PHP is one of the most commonly used languages for cloud application deployments," noted Betsy Zikakis, Vice President at RightScale. "By partnering with Zend, we can offer PHP professionals an easy and safe path into cloud computing. With the RightScale Solution Pack for Development and Test, they can gain fast access to all the cloud computing resources they need while using Zend Server to run and debug their applications. The combination of RightScale and Zend products helps developers get software into the hands of users faster."