PaaS (Platform as a Service) is hot topic in the PHP world, with many different providers vying to run your code. I'll look at what it takes to get your code to run on the common PaaS services, and compare and contrast them on their offerings and performance

1. PaaSing Your
Code Around
EMAIL: CHRIS@CTANKERSLEY.COM
TWITTER: @DRAGONMANTANK
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2. Who Am I?
 Chris Tankersley
 Been Doing PHP for 9+ Years
 Lots of projects no one
uses, and a few that some do:
 https://github.com/dragonman
tank
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3. What is PaaS?
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4. Software as a Service (SaaS)
Software Package
Platform as a Service
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Server Language Deployment Scripts
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Server Infrastructure Storage Network
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5. Why use a PaaS?
 Offload the work to someone else
 Possibly (maybe) more cost effective
 Small shops don‟t have to hire as many people
 Scalability, both up and down
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6. PaaS Workflow
Git
repo
Feature Branch
Feature Branch
Feature Branch
Run Paas
Deployment Your App Runs!
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7. Basic Knowledge
 Just about all of them use git
 Just about all of them work best with a command
line
 Your OS doesn‟t matter, they all pretty much
support everything
 A server-side scripting language
 Bash, Ruby, Python
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8. Other Considerations
 Where will uploaded files live?
 Does my app scale across multiple servers?
 How well does my application perform?
 Can I automate everything?
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10. Let‟s set up a site on a
PaaS
 https://github.com/dragonmantank/paasing-
your-code-around
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11. What I built
 Silex App that displayed user-supplied „texts‟ from
drunk elephants
 Silex
 Symfony Forms
 Ruckusing Migrations
 Twig
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12. What did I want to find
out?
 How much code I had to change to get it to work
 How much of a pain was it to get the deployment
process set up
 How long the deployments took
 How easy the deployments were
 How easy things were to manage
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13. What I did
 Created the basic app in vagrant
 Signed up for a PaaS
 Heroku
 Engineyard
 Redhat OpenShift
 Amazon ElasticBeanstalk
 Made the app work
 Each set of code is in paas/[service]
 You can fork the repo, checkout the branch, and
set up the config
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14. Heroku
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15. Heroku
 Heroku is a container-based PaaS
 Each container (dyno) is a little virtualized
environment
 “Supports” PHP 5.3.27 and Apache 2.2.25 out of
the box
 Has a command line interface for working with
your apps
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16. Heroku – Creating an
Application
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17. Heroku – Deploying an
App
 Push your branch to Heroku‟s master branch
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18. Heroku – Getting it to
Work
 Heroku will only detect a PHP app if there is an
index.php file in the root
 Docroot is automatically set to the root of your
repo
 PHP is supported via a partnership with
Facebook, not that you‟ll find that on their site
 Had to add a custom Procfile, bootstrap files, and
Buildpack
 Composer is slooooooow. Sites took 2-15 minutes
to bootstrap
 Deploy hooks are done via the Procfile
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19. Heroku – General Notes
 Extension support is hit or miss. You might need to
compile your own
 Since buildpacks actually set up an entire
environment, really study what buildpack you use
 Might want to commit vendor/ to your deploy
branch to speed things up
 While PHP 5.3.27 is the base install, you can
actually install any PHP via a buildpack
 Heroku uses ephemeral storage, so make sure all
your files are saved to something like S3
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20. Engineyard
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21. Engineyard
 Engineyard is an AWS-based PaaS
 You set up Environments, which are groups of
EC2 instances
 Supports PHP 5.4.17 and MySQL 5.5 out of the box
 Has a command line interface for working with
your apps
 Works with your VCS host to pull down and deploy
code
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22. Engineyard – Creating an
Application
 Create a new application
 Select the Language
 Give it a Repo to pull from
 Give it a Name
 Tell it the docroot
 Add your deploy key to your git server
 Set up an Environment
 Give it a name
 Give it a type (Production, Development, etc)
 Select a DB
 Set up SSH keys
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23. Engineyard – Deploying
an App
 Give it a branch name and click „Deploy‟
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24. Engineyard – Getting it to
Work
 Had to add a deploy/ script to get the database
migrations to work
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25. Engineyard – General
Notes
 You need to set up SSH keys to get into the boxes
 DB credentials are in
/data/[app_name]/shared/config/databases.yml
 They are also exposed through the $_SERVER array
 When you stop an instance without a public
IP, the IPs will change
 Since it‟s booting an EC2 instance, it‟s slow. Takes
10-15 minutes to provision the environment
(Deploys are much quicker)
 Natively supports Composer!
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26. Redhat OpenShift
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27. OpenShift
 OpenShift is a „cartridge‟ (container) PaaS
 Supports PHP 5.3.17 and MySQL 5.1 when using
the Zend Server cartridge
 Has a command line interface for working with
your apps
 The largest offering of platforms out of the test
PaaS‟s
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28. OpenShift – Creating an
Application
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29. OpenShift – Deploying an
App
 Push your branch to OpenShift‟s master branch
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30. OpenShift– Getting it to
Work
 Had to fetch and merge their master branch
 Docroot is php/, so our deploy script changes that
 php-intl extension had too old of an ICU
version, so had to downgrade it through
Composer
 Could have completely redone PHP, like in Heroku
 Composer is not natively supported, so do it via
the deploy script
 Deploy script is bash, so fairly easy to work with
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31. OpenShift – General Notes
 You need to set up SSH keys to get into the boxes
 Cartridge system is interesting and works well
 Does offer persistent storage, in the
$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR
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32. AWS ElasticBeanstalk
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33. ElasticBeanStalk
 It‟s a Rackspace-based PaaS!
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34. ElasticBeanStalk
 It‟s a Rackspace-based PaaS!
 It‟s an AWS-based PaaS
 Supports PHP 5.4 out of the box, and Amazon RDS
for DB
 Has a nice command line interface
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35. ElasticBeanstalk –
Creating an Application
 Log in AWS and go to ElasticBeanstalk
 Create an Application through their „eb‟ tool
 Go to your repo
 Run „eb init‟ and answer the questions
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36. ElasticBeanstalk –
Deploying an App
 Run „eb branch‟ to assign your branch to an
environment
 Run „git aws.push‟ to deploy
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37. ElasticBeanstalk – Getting
it to Work
 Had to run „eb init‟ and run through their
setup, even though the environment existed
 Had to run „eb branch‟ to assign the current
branch to an environment so that „git aws.push‟
would work
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38. ElasticBeanstalk – General
Notes
 It‟s AWS, so provisioning the servers can take 10-15
minutes
 Supports Composer out of the box, which is nice
 Deploy hooks are done via their
container_commands
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39. So What did I Learn?
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40. Deploy Scripts Are Your
Friend
 While you‟ve got shell access, you still don‟t want
to do stuff manually
 Knowing Bash scripting was incredibly helpful
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41. Understand Your Type of
PaaS
 Usually either container-based
 OpenShift
 Heroku
 Or Server-based
 ElasticBeanstalk
 Engineyard
 These work internally differently, so understand
how each works makes your life easier
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42. Your Code Should Just
Work
 A good PaaS won‟t need you to modify your
code
 My code modifications were changing DB-
backends or making assumptions I shouldn‟t have
 Most of the differences in the sample code are
deploy scripts and the config file
 That‟s ignoring storage issues, which you might
need to work on
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43. Questions? 43

44. Thank You!
 chris@ctankersley.com
 @dragonmantank
 https://joind.in/9070
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