Cloud computing management company RightScale has teamed with Zend Technologies to announce a jointly developed solution for deploying and managing PHP applications with strong elasticity and portability characteristics in the cloud.

The new RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack is described as a preconfigured open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture for what the companies refer to as "faster cloud onboarding" while maintaining the ability to customize and control the cloud environment.

The RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack combines the RightScale Cloud Management Platform with the Zend PHP architecture powered by Zend Server. This configuration makes the offering "production-ready," says Zend, meaning that the solution can instantly provision a preconfigured, clustered PHP environment that scales dynamically while ensuring high availability.

Web applications are increasingly deployed in the cloud to benefit from the elasticity, cost-savings, and other efficiencies of cloud infrastructures. Many businesses are using the cloud to build entirely new business models or support massive marketing campaigns, as well as to support more traditional development, testing, and production release of web applications.

The RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack comes bundled with RightScale premium onboarding — a step-by-step path to deploying on the cloud — which is intended to help customers get started quickly while following best practices developed jointly by RightScale and Zend.

"Considering PHP's ubiquity on the web, it wasn't a question of if it embraced the cloud, but when," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk. "With the recently announced RightScale/Zend partnership, the two companies are offering PHP users the best of both worlds, with the time to market of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the flexibility of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)."

RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack: Full Capabilities:

• Preconfigured Zend PHP architecture to speed time to market
• Autoscaling based on system and application load metrics, supported by load balancing
• PHP session clustering for high availability
• Redundant database with failover and recovery
• System, server, and application-level monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics
• Cloud portability

"Through our partnership with RightScale we enable customers to take full advantage of the cloud," said Andi Gutmans, CEO and cofounder of Zend. "With the new solution, customers can benefit from the agility and elasticity offered by the cloud, while using Zend's proven, enterprise-grade PHP runtime environment in production."