The Amazon Web Services Developer Connection recently published an article I wrote for them called, “Hosting Flex Applications and PHP Services with the Zend Framework in Amazon EC2″. Naturally, I’m the last person to find out about these things, so you may already know about this. The purpose of the article is to assist RIA Flex and Zend PHP developers in getting their apps up and running in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud rather than via the typical paradigm of hosting on a physical server or cluster of servers.

Ironically, I found out it was published already from a mass email that showed up in my inbox from Amazon Web Services. The purpose of this massive email blast was to announce the 3rd annual  AWS Start-up Challenge, but I scrolled down and found a promotional piece for my article under “Developer Resources”. It seems that publishers are just unaware of the fact that authors like to know when their material has been published, regardless of what the publishing medium is.

Anyway, this article took me weeks in research, and only six hours to write once I finally had it all figured out. I went through at least one hundred and fifty different ways of setting up and configuring an Amazon EC2 cluster to run a Flex application that communicated with PHP services created with the Zend framework on the server side. This is worth keeping in mind when reading the article. My objective when I wrote the article was to find the simplest method of setup and configuration, then base my tutorial on that, which I did. It is worth noting when reading the article though, that it describes only one step-by-step way of getting things up and running, but its not the only way. At the same time, I butchered my setup and configuration many times while in pursuit of the easiest possible way to run a Flex app on EC2.

With that in mind, if you haven’t worked much with AWS and the Elastic Compute Cloud yet, I strongly recommend following the tutorial in the exact step-by-step order that is provided until you become more familiar with it.

The most important thing I would like to point out is that this is my fourth article for AWS, and the more I’ve gotten to know the Amazon “Infrastucture as a Service” and how it all ties together, the more I see an incredible opportunity for businesses of all sizes to significantly reduce their IT costs.  As businesses begin realizing this, more and more developers that know AWS will be needed, so if I may be so bold as to provide some advice if you are a developer that is fairly new to Amazon Web Services, its this:

Learn AWS, and learn it yesterday.

This article serves as a great starting point for developers of any type, and I’m not just saying that because I wrote it. Seriously,  I’ve saved you an insane amount of time by figuring out the best way to setup EC2, and then described my findings in a step-by-step tutorial here so you can get up and running in minutes, not hours, so its definitely worth a look. Your clients will undoubtedly appreciate you for the money they end up saving on hosting costs thanks to you. Click the image below to be taken straight to the article on the AWS web site.

Cheers!

Possibly Related Posts:

• FlashCamp is coming to Phoenix Dec. 4th – Early Bird Registration
• Flex 4 Features for Creating Software as a Service now on IBM developerWorks
• Discover the Power of Flex and CSS – on IBM developerWorks
• “Flex 4 in Action” (Early Access Edition) Now Available!
• Adobe Flash Builder 4: Data-centric Features for PHP (PHPBuilder.com)

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Posted by Dan Orlando on July 14th, 2009 :: Filed under Announcements
Tags :: Amazon EC2, Enterprise RIA, Flex, PHP, Zend
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