Zend Platform

Today's screencast features Zend Platform, a new management solution for PHP-based sites. The other voices you'll hear on the screencast (or the companion podcast) are those of Pamela Roussos, marketing VP for Zend, and Andi Gutmans, co-founder and technology VP. Gutmans and Zend's other co-founder, Zeev Suraski, are the authors of PHP's core engine, known as the Zend Engine. The new product, announced today, exploits their expertise with PHP internals to surface to the site administrator what Gutmans calls PHP intelligence.

Topics discussed or demonstrated include:

• the Zend Central console
• integration (or not) with other environments and management consoles
• how the solution can co-exist with production servers
• configuration of rules for alerts
• baselining of normal site behavior
• managing clusters of PHP servers
• partial implementation of web services interfaces
• relationship between Zend Platform and the Zend Performance Suite
• bridging between PHP and Java

As with PATH Communications' P.A.M., featured in an earlier screencast, Zend Platform is part of a growing trend toward solutions that help operations teams and development teams collaborate more effectively. Historically, when the ops people noticed slow response time or high resource utilization, there weren't good ways to connect those symptoms to the underlying software and to engage productively with its developers.

It's great to see these collaborative solutions emerging. When they proliferate, though, the the next step -- as Andi Gutmans acknowledges in our conversation -- will be to ensure that we can easily consolidate them.

Video: Flash, 21 min, audio: MP3, 21 min

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