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Win a Free Ticket to php|tek for Your User Group! »

Created at: 17.05.2012 00:05, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community Contests events php

User group leaders, listen up! We have an extra Full Experience tickets to php|tek, and we'd like to give it to the community to use. php|tek happens May 22-25 in Chicago, Illinois, and is jam packed with PHP goodness, including an Unconference and a Hackathon. I mean, have you seen this schedule?!  Your winner is also welcome to join us at the Engine Yard JAUNT on Friday night after the conference. There is undoubtedly much awesomeness to be had next week.

If you are interested in participating, drop me a line by Thursday, May 17 and let me know. We'll randomly select a user group to receive the ticket, and you can give it out however you wish. Thumb wrestling champion? Karaoke competition? Hackathon winner? Best high fiver? It's really up to you.

As soon as you have a winner, let me know and we'll make the arrangements with the fine folks at Blue Parabola, hosts of the conference.

Join us at the Engine Yard Community JAUNT »

Created at: 30.04.2012 23:24, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community events php

Engine Yard Community JAUNT (Just Another Unforgettable Night on the Town)

If you’re going to be around after php|tek on Friday, May 25, we want you to come have an adventure with us! We’re all going to sample the sights and sounds of downtown Chicago, and have some fun in the process (in true PHP Community spirit).

The Community JAUNT will include:

• Blue Line Tickets to/from downtown Chicago.   The Blue Line will take us directly from O’Hare to Jackson Station, a few blocks from where we’ll be spending most of our time. Trains run regularly, so when you’re ready to go home, you can do so at any time. We’ll provide you with a schedule, or you can find it online.
• Dinner at Giordano’s Pizza.   Chicago’s deep dish Giordano’s is world-famous, and we’ll be eating at one of the oldest locations in the city. (http://giordanos.com)
• Tickets to the Skydeck.   We’ll see Chicago like never before: 1,353 ft. in the air! If you’re brave enough, you can enter one of the glass boxes extending out 4 feet into the air from the 103rd floor. For more information on the whole Skydeck experience, their site offers a video tour (http://www.theskydeck.com/plan-visit/the-skydeck-experience-video).
• Drinks at Elephant and Castle.   From there, we’ll visit one of the local “English-inspired” pubs to relax over a few pints. (http://elephantcastle.com). We have been told by the locals that they have one of the best whisky selections in the city.
• Drinks at Miller’s Pub.   We’ll end the evening at the Chicago landmark, Miller’s Pub. Opened in 1935, this pub still offers an impressive list of beer, wine, and spirits, and is a favorite of celebrities passing through. And, for you night owls who want to stay when the rest of us have long gone, it’s open until 4 am. (http://millerspub.com).

You can also see our plan mapped out here.

We’ll be picking up the tab on the whole night, so we hope you can come enjoy Chicago with us. Space is limited to 50 people, so we suggest you register early.

We can’t wait to hang out with you in Chicago!

Voices of the ElePHPant- Season 2 »

Created at: 23.02.2012 20:30, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community php

I'm so happy to announce that Engine Yard will be sponsoring Season 2 of the Voices of the ElePHPant. If you're not familiar with this podcast, every week, Cal Evans interviews various members of the PHP Community who are making efforts in moving the PHP ecosystem forward. It's a great listen!

In the recently released Episode 1 of Season 2, Cal interviews Matthew Weier O'Phinney about MicroPHP frameworks, Zend Framework 2, and a new PHP user group that's starting up in Sioux Falls, SD.

You can listen to the full podcast on the Voices of the ElePHPant site.

PHPUK Unconference Info »

Created at: 13.02.2012 23:48, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events php

We are thrilled to be sponsoring and assisting in the coordination of the Unconference this year at PHPUK Conference in London, February 24-25, 2012. From the site:

The unconference will run alongside all the main sessions, with exception of the keynotes, panel sessions and closing address. It will offer 15 or 20 minute slots where any attendee of the conference is free to give a talk or workshop on any subject of their choice (that would be of interest to a PHP user).

If I've done my math correctly, that works out to about 12 talks per day, or 24 total opportunities for you to share your knowledge with others. If you've never given a talk before, this is a great way to get started! It's low pressure, informal, and intimate. What are you waiting for?

There will be a big sign up sheet at the venue itself, so grab a pen and write in your slot when you get there. I will be there as well, to help you and to keep things rolling along smoothly. Don't hesitate to seek me out if you have any questions at all.

The fine folks at PHPUK have also suggested that if you have ideas for topics before the conference starts, you can add them to the comments section of the Unconference page of the site.

We are very excited to be a part of this conference! (Did we mention that our very own Helgi Þorbjörnsson and Davey Shafik will be speaking as well?)

See you in London!

Orchestra Elastic Apps For Everyone »

Created at: 07.02.2012 21:24, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Orchestra Platform php Product auto-scalling elastic orchestra release

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally made our auto-scaling elastic app capability available to everybody on Orchestra. Previously, this was only enabled on an account-by-account basis. An elastic app is smart enough to scale up when your traffic increases and scale down when your traffic decreases. You don't have to do anything, and you can deploy this sort of app right away. Sign in to your account now and select "Deploy An Elastic App" from the sidebar.

So how exactly do elastic apps differ from basic apps? Well, our basic apps offer you a single fixed amount of resources. For small apps, or staging versions of your production apps, this is fine. But for bigger things that need to handle a variable load, we have elastic apps. These apps start with one scale unit and increase by one scale unit at a time as your resource usage increases. As resource usage decreases, we scale you down by one scale unit at a time too.

But what's a scale unit? One scale unit provides up to 1.2 GB RAM and 2 Dual Core CPUs burstable to 1GHz. Behind the scenes, this may be provided by one or more server instances. We do this to maximize the redundancy of your app, and its fault tolerance to network outages, restarts, and other low-level problems that you shouldn't have to worry about. This ability to recover from problems ensures that your apps are auto-healing, as well as auto-scaling.

What does this mean for your app? Well, on a day to day basis, the app will run with as many scale units as it needs to function properly. You don't have to guess at what this might be, because our system works it out for you. And when someone links to your site in the middle of the night, and you experience a traffic peak, we scale you up to handle the increase in resource usage. And then we scale you back down again when traffic returns to normal.

How should you write elastic apps? Well, if you want to take advantage of our auto-scaling and auto-healing, your apps will need to embrace a shared-nothing architecture. In the general case, that means you need to design your app so that individual instances of it can be killed off and respawned at any moment. This means keeping all your data in separate database like MySQL or MongoDB, which we provide addons for. And it means that you need to write file uploads to a shared storage service, such as Amazon's S3. But whatever you do, don't write anything important to local filesystem, or it will be lost when we auto-scale or auto-heal.

If you have any questions about this, or about how best to build elastic apps for Orchestra, please get in touch. At the moment, apps are capped to eight scale units. If you need more than that, you can request a higher cap by submitting a support ticket. In the future, we plan to add more intelligent ways of handling and safe-guarding scale unit allocation. We'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you haven't seen it already, check out our revamped pricing model.