

We built a cloud platform for PHP. Wait… what? - juokaz
http://blog.webspecies.co.uk/2011-10-03/we-built-a-cloud-platform-for-php-wait-what.html

======
cheald
I'm having trouble understand the value-add here. PHP is so dominant
specifically because it's so easy to deploy - it's everywhere, and requires
next to nothing to have a working installation up and running. There's no
compelling reason to run PHP on Windows over Linux (and a bunch of reasons not
to). The one feature that might sell me is a Heroku-style "addons" system,
with things like Memcached, Redis, error aggregation and reporting, logging,
and the like all ready to deploy at the touch of a button, but there's no
mention of anything like that.

So, sell me. Why would I pay a premium for Azure+ when I can roll out my own
equivalent infrastructure trivially, or use the existing competitor?

~~~
roel_v
Well, let's look at the options: \- Run own server. Buy hardware, find colo
etc. I guess the advantages of PaaS are obvious here. \- Run vps, manage
yourself. Required: somebody to buy/maintain the machine, plus a lot
sysadminning. Advantages of PaaS obvious, too. \- Run managed vps. Advantages
of PaaS become less obvious. Maybe more supported versions, more specific
functionality. Or automatic scaling (from tweaking db disk access times to
network-level load-balancing); you don't get that with a managed vps.

I guess my point is that rolling out your own equivalent infrastructure is far
from 'trivial'. Buying machines, worrying about mundane details like amps on
the power backbone, setting up and maintaining the server software (lol at the
first person - there always is one - to suggest that this can be solved with
putting 'apt-get update' or equivalent in cron), or testing various versions
of infrastructure software with your app because you don't know if it'll be
safe to deploy that update that came out yesterday - I don't use PaaS but I
see many advantages for small-time operations (and maybe bigger ones too,
maybe I'd trust them more if I had more experience with them).

~~~
cheald
I understand the benefit of PaaS; I've used Heroku on occassion, and PHPFog
seems to be making in the space as well. If you just want an app online, and
don't care about how it gets there, and have more money than system
administration skill, PaaS is great. My question is more along the lines of
"What do I get with Azure+ that I don't get with PHPFog or an existing AWS AMI
or a Linode StackScript?" What's the killer feature? It's going to be more
expensive (you get to buy a cloud-sized slice of a Windwos license), likely
slower than a Linux platform (the benchmarks I've seen put PHP on Windows
significantly behind Linux deploys), and so far, it doesn't solve the hard
parts of a PHP application deployment.

I'm a Rails developer, mostly, and I have Heroku apps, apps running on Linode
VMs, apps running on rented Rackspace servers, and apps running on AWS. I've
got a lot of experience setting this stuff up and maintaining it, but I still
really appreciate the simplicity of Heroku; a dashboard of services and
extensions ready to install in a click is _awesome_. Heroku's killer feature
isn't that you don't have to set up RVM and Passenger, it's that you don't
have to write bundles of daemon managers, monitoring scripts, rake tasks to
manage code deploys and reloads, git hooks, background worker management, and
a bunch of otherwise-tedious stuff.

The sales pitch for Azure+ seems to be "We solved a problem that only exists
on Azure", which just isn't very compelling. So far, it seems like the only
target audience for this thing is people who will only deploy PHP apps on
Azure and don't have any other options, period, which seems like a _really_
small target audience.

~~~
roel_v
Oh ok then I got your point wrong, no worries.

------
DCoder
In my experience, writing PHP on one platform and deploying it on another
doesn't always work out. Your developers have to be aware of where their app
will be deployed and the specifics of that OS.

> I think PHP support on Windows is as good as on any other OS.

I have seen several things fail in that environment - escaping shell commands
and arguments is problematic, invoking external executables is only reliable
when full path is used [1], realpath() (used to, at least) chokes on / as a
directory separator... Autoloading classes based on classname => filename can
produce funny results. File uploads can work differently (case sensitive
filenames - foo.jpg and foo.JPG can coexist in Linux, but not in Windows).

On the other hand, there are things like the new MSSQL PDO driver that only
exist in the Windows world.

\---

[1] Windows 2003 Server was running our app, which invoked Imagick similar to
`convert $input.jpg $output.jpg`.

Worked just great for half a year.

Deployed to a second machine, Windows 2008 Server.

Command execution fails silently.

Change %PATH% to be identical to the old server's one.

Restart.

Still fails.

Compare phpinfo().

$_ENV['PATH'] in new server doesn't match %PATH% (it appears to be re-sorted
with windows folders first), $_ENV['PATH'] in old server matches %PATH%.

Messing around with new %PATH% changes nothing, new server keeps giving PHP
the silently-reordered %PATH%.

Nothing helps, short of specifying full path to `convert`.

A very fun thing to debug.

------
mappu
Sounds great...

>Similarly to C++ relation to C, Azure+ is Azure done right and useble

There's a certain class of people who will see this and think "Ha! The product
must be a thoughtless inconsistent kludge of new features, tacked haphazardly
onto a perfectly fine strong, simple, performant base for popularity's sake".
Although, i suspect there's very little overlap with your target audience.

~~~
juokaz
Author here, I think this sentence missed what I was trying to say completely.
Wrong wording, my fault...

~~~
mappu
My apologies too, I don't mean to criticise without trying your product. It
seems like you've made a lot of advances.

I see where you're going, i just think the analogy would be inappropriate if
this were a product aimed at C or C++ developers (which it isn't). Perhaps,
"Notepad to Notepad++"?

------
ridruejo
I see a lot of negative comments, but I actually think it is quite interesting
that they are targeting Windows/ Azure. There are situations in which the
platform to deploy the apps has been decided higher up in the organization
(that can be for a variety of reasons, some more rational than others) and in
many cases it is Windows. In that case the question is not whether it is
better to use Heroku or Azure, it is how to make Azure suck less :) The
AppHarbor guys are doing well with a similar approach to .NET As a reference
point, I am one of the developers of BitNami.org (we also provide a cloud
hosting service) and we get over 150k developers every month coming to the
site to get LAMP environments, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. You will be surprised
at the (quite high) percentage of those developers that run open source web
apps (PHP, Java, Ruby) on Windows. Again, not recommending that you do so,
just remarking it is not as weird as some of the comments here make it look
(though HN is probably not the target audience :)

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mgkimsal
Might there not be a slight naming issue with using "Azure"?

~~~
caseysoftware
I see Microsoft having to slap him with a notice just because they _have_ to
defend the trademark.. not necessarily because they want to. Bad form on his
part.

------
obeattie
Maybe I'm missing something here… but is there a particular reason that you
built your service atop what you admit yourselves to be a crap platform, other
than "nobody else is doing it"?

Seems to me there's a reason nobody else was doing it.

~~~
juokaz
It's not really good platform from developers perspective, the one deploying
stuff. But it's not a bad platform from platform perspective and allows great
things to be built on top who actually make it fine for developers. Makes
sense?..

------
aphexairlines
Haven't a zillion web hosts already been providing people with php hosting
since the 90s?

------
vyrotek
_"If you have tried to deploy anything to Azure you'll know that it takes 15
or more minutes, which is unacceptable!"_

I've been using Azure for a year and a half. I feel like I know it pretty
well. Yes, this was a problem originally but has been solved with the Web
Accelerator. You can now deploy your web projects instantly across all nodes.

I can only laugh when I see 'Azure done right'. Isn't that
<http://AppHarbor.com> tagline too? Sorry, but you don't buy Azure for a
single web box for your toy project. You buy it for the suite of other
features that are all available in the same datacenter. Message Queues, NoSql
(Table Storage), SQL Azure and many other enterprise level feature.

------
TheRealReinH
> Right now we are working on adding MySQL support, so you can port pretty
> much any existing app.

If you're offering a PHP PaaS, shouldn't you plan support for the de facto
standard PHP RDBMS out of the gate?

> Currently a group of 15 or so people is actively testing this and is sending
> us valuable feedback. Nevertheless it’s quite close to production-quality
> service and you’ll hear more about it very soon.

Be careful there. 15 people is not a large enough sample size to claim that
your _distributed_ system is "close to production-quality". There are plenty
of assumptions that work for 15 people that could completely fall over at
scale.

------
Maro
So this is for Windows people who want to run PHP in the cloud? Is that a big
enough market to sustain a SAAS company? I'd think most Windows people
gravitate toward Microsoft/.NET based web technologies.

Btw, how is it different from PHP Fog?

~~~
alnayyir
Good for a 6am-because-I-stayed-up-all-night laugh though.

The post is devoid of any information that is actually useful and seems like a
medium for pointless meme comics.

Why do I care about this? You need to answer this question within the first
paragraph, if not sentence.

This is the polar opposite of good copy.

I will use this anti-example in my next discussion of copywriting with my
employers/clients.

SAAS/PAAS for PHP/Windows programmers? The punchline writes itself.

Automation of internal infrastructure is good, but you're not really going to
be able to improve upon or otherwise differentiate yourself from any of the
existing providers.

~~~
Jgrubb
Take it easy, man.

------
kayoone
so it looks like right now you have nothing, just the idea of a PHP cloud
platform built on the MS cloud. What exactly makes this better than say PHPFog
who have a Heroku Style solution for PHP that is already solid and proven ?

~~~
regularfry
It looks more like they've already got something in testing. It's possible
it's more than vapour.

------
Egregore
Now most hosting providers offer accounts with php, how your offer will be
better?

------
poundy
I haven't used IIS web server in a while. Does IIS support URL rewriting yet?

~~~
juokaz
Yes, it does. It can also import from .htaccess quite fine.

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jsavimbi
This is a non-starter from many angles, aside from the choice of
platform/language, a choice in which they completely missed what the actual
target market does and how they do it. Inconsiderate product/market fit.

I wouldn't be so negative if the ignorance of the copy and comments weren't so
palpable.

------
drivebyacct2
Oh Azure. What a bundle of joy. I can only imagine the pleasure brought by
using a service layered of top... for php. This one may give me nightmares.

