February 28th, 2012

Awwe - it's February! And NYPHP has been shot yet again by the cupids in the clouds, welcoming Justin DeMaris, Senior Engineer at Buddy Media, for a rare technical look at what makes the cloud so loveable - virtualization.

Virtualization has changed the platform playing field for web development considerably. With the advent of platforms like Amazon's EC2, not only can our PHP apps scale outward with a few clicks of the mouse, but our apps can also be platform-aware and provide all of the right metrics to know when is the right time to scale. This presentation is going to cover the core models and issues that you will encounter as a PHP programmer in a virtualized world. Focusing on EC2, but brushing on private virtual infrastructures with VMWare, Xen and KVM, we will talk about how the virtual environment affects your production code execution and your development environment as well as what new considerations you should be taking into account for every app you write. We will finish by going over future features you might want to consider that this infrastructure approach makes possible.

Material will be a combination of slide show and live demos with the technology.

Justin DeMaris grew up in the back woods of Maine at the end of a dirt road with no electricity. True story. His friend claims that when he finally moved into modern civilization at the age of 12, he decided he had to learn these computer things, and kind of over-compensated. Justin started programming at 13 and loved it so much he got a bachelors in it from University of Connecticut. Working on a lot of very small teams he also had to branch out into system administration land and has worked using VMWare ESXi, Xen, and Amazon EC2. He was a major contributor early on to the Zentific Xen management UI project and has run LAMP clusters along with NoSQL clusters on EC2 for a New York advertising agency, supporting hundreds of millions of ad impressions a day.