While Microsoft have been busy making noise on their Cloud offerings to businesses, they have been helping developers get involved too. Last week at the PHP Tek conference, the Interoperability team announced the release of the Azure SDK for PHP v3.
The SDK is open-source and hosted on CodePlex, and allows developers of PHP applications to easily tie in to Azure’s storage, computation and management interfaces. To help developers even further, there is also a Sample Kit for PHP on Azure to give some extra help.
The primary new features in version 3 of the SDK are management related. This means that PHP developers can now more easily tie into the parts of Azure that organise deployments of applications. Monitoring activity of instances and scaling up and down based on thresholds is now possible, making it even easier for PHP applications to use Azure as a scaling component. The sample application, clearly based on something like Groupon, shows this example by allowing the website itself to automatically scale up and down the number of instances it runs on based on the usage during the day – this means it can easily cope with spikes in demand as deals are released while scaling back at quiet times in a cost-effective manner.
Check out the SDK on CodePlex.
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