Zend Technologies today announced phpcloud.com on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure as a new application platform for cloud-focused developers. Aiming to marry the elastic nature of the cloud and what Zend calls the "agility of PHP", the new platform is centered on build, deploy, and manage stages of cloud application creation.

The guts of phpcloud.com are made up of the Zend Developer Cloud, a cloud development environment that sits alongside the Zend Application Fabric application platform, which delivers PHP on Amazon's service layer. Zend's developer offering is further composed of a PHP developer sandbox with application insight tools such as code tracing that enable real-time debugging and problem resolution.

Integrated with this new developer cloud, the Zend Application Fabric layer is positioned as a route to deploying with the confidence of knowing that cloud apps can meet end-user expectation for fast responses, while being elastic enough to scale with fluctuating and unpredictable demand — and dependable enough to ensure high availability.

The company's new offering also features collaborative capabilities for developers to show work in progress to stakeholders and facilitating intra- and inter-team collaboration. This peer-level collaboration enables options to clone and share fully functional application stacks. Zend also points out that developers using its latest product release have the advantage of integration with a range of popular development environment options: Zend Studio, Eclipse PDT, command-line interface, and other tools.