Red Hat has expanded its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) ecosystem with a PHP-flavored enhancement by collaborating with Zend. A new Zend Server for the Red Hat OpenShift offering provides the OpenShift PaaS with a PHP development and runtime environment.

A key benefit here appears to rest in the fact that PHP applications deployed to Zend Server for OpenShift can access built-in debugging, monitoring, and application performance tuning.

Developers will get data and bytecode caching and the ability to use job queue capabilities to speed up core application processes. OpenShift is also said to make it simple to plug in additional software cartridges like MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL to work with developers' PHP applications.

Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS is essentially a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks, and application lifecycle tools. There is built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java. Customizable cartridge functionality also exists for developers who demand additional languages.

"Today, with the combination of Zend and OpenShift, it is much simpler to deploy and manage PHP applications in the cloud without the hassle of setting up servers and configuring software," said Ashesh Badani, general manager, cloud business unit and OpenShift, Red Hat.

"We saw a strong opportunity to partner with OpenShift to make the enterprise capabilities of Zend Server available to the community of developers that are taking advantage of the OpenShift PaaS," said Andi Gutmans, CEO, Zend.