PHP 7 support and portable public IP addresses now available on Layershift Jelastic PaaS

We’ve just added 2 more great features to our Jelastic PaaS to help you to deploy and run your sites with maximum performance and efficiency.

PHP 7: Max performance, minimum cost

Hot on the heels of introducing PHP 7 to our Cloud VPS hosting plans, we’re happy to follow it up by announcing the immediate availability of  PHP 7 on the Layershift Jelastic PaaS as well.

Until now, our Jelastic PaaS was a great place to check your code for PHP 7 compatibility, via the Docker(R) based container images – available since the PHP 7 project launched its release candidates, but from today PHP 7 has graduated to a first class citizen of our Jelastic PaaS.

Why is PHP 7 so exciting? Besides an assortment of new language features to take  your productivity to the next level, PHP 7 offers substantial performance increases whilst also using less  memory.

Thanks to our unique auto-vertical scaling – where you only pay for resource consumption, not instance size – this means using PHP 7 saves money. I’ll say that again, very slowly:

The Jelastic PaaS is one of the first to offer PHP 7, and its introduction  was closely supervised by Rasmus Lerdorf himself, creator of PHP. Here’s what Rasmus had to say about the Jelastic PHP 7 upgrade:

“Getting people to upgrade from old unsupported versions of PHP has always been an issue for us. It is great to see Jelastic making it easy for customers to be proactive in this regard and combined with the improved performance and new features of this version I think Jelastic customers should be excited about this,” said.

Indeed, a noteworthy detail of this update is that PHP 7 is not just available to new environments, but is also just a few clicks away for all of your existing PHP environments. This allows you to quickly and easily validate your existing applications on PHP 7, and rollback to your existing version just as fast if there are problems.

Those who prefer to take a more measured approach have the option to clone your existing environment (in just a few clicks) and perform your testing there without disruption to your production sites and applications.

That leads us nicely to the next big feature we’re announcing in this update:

Portable public IP addresses

Our previous update introduced a really cool feature for zero-downtime PHP application updates using a few plumes of smoke and a handful of mirrors (aka symlinks). Many of you told us how much you love this new feature, but we also heard a few dissenting voices at the back asking about whole-environment updates. Yes, we heard you.

This is where portable public IP addresses come in. Now you can actually move a public IP from one environment to another. No DNS issues for you.

 

This is really useful for times when you wish to upgrade your environment to the latest and greatest stacks offered under new environments, because now you can get everything prepared “just so”, and then simply flip your existing IP address across to the new environment to make it live.

Moreover, it significantly enhances our support for blue / green deployment workflows.

Under this workflow, you maintain 2 environments: denoted as blue and green. One is your live production environment (e.g. blue), whilst the other is your stage (e.g. green).

Having prepared a new release, you switch the roles of the 2 environments – making green live, and blue your new stage. When you hit your next release, you simply reverse the rolls once again.

The obvious point is that you should do this with the least downtime possible.

This new feature allows you to move your public IP from a specified node in the blue environment to a specified node in the green environment with just a few seconds downtime.

This hot-swap portable IP address feature therefore enables you to roll forward (and, if needed, back) in a very simple and elegant fashion.

We couldn’t wait for the pixel pushing to finish to make this awesome feature available, so for now, this feature is only available via the API & CLI. If that makes you sad, then please feel free to cry on our shoulder in the comments below!

Share your PHP 7 performance gain stats

We hope you like the new updates. We can’t wait to hear the performance improvements you clock by switching your app to PHP 7, and of course the cost savings you make in the process – so please comment below or connect with us on Twitter or Google+.

Don’t forget, our 24×7 support team are right behind you every step of the way if you need our technical assistance.