PHP needs to embrace operational efficiency to fully realize its potential

Last month, I was fortunate enough to attend the International PHP Conference 2009 in Karlsruhe, Germany.  I was invited to present on our open-source project, and wound up joining a cloud computing panel with a number of luminaries in the field.  After these talks I was able to walk around and speak with many of the conference-goers candidly outside of the session environment.

One of the big takeaways from these conversations is that PHP is as relevant in the marketplace as ever.  Its strengths are fully in line with today’s business needs.  Rapid, cheap, and high level development means shorter time to market at lower cost, which means a real focus on a value-add solution.  A pleasant takeaway in an industry known for quickly evolving attitudes and rapid turnover.

There was one rather surprising revelation, though: PHP cloud developers aren’t engaging with the cloud yet, one of the most buzzwordy, noisiest spaces out there.  They are largely in a holding pattern.  When I took a step back to think about it, this made total sense.  We can be a skeptical bunch, especially when it comes to new things that haven’t been fully defined or proven to stand the test of time.

And that’s the situation we’re in with the cloud right now.  It’s still novel and not fully understood.  So, to many, it’s just too early to commit to a singular definition of the cloud.  Because cloud computing is such a broad concept and evolving at such a fast pace, there’s no concrete set of features we can point to when we talk about it.  As a result, most messaging around cloud offerings is simply confusing people.  And when we try to paint things in broad brushstrokes, we only contribute to the confusion.

This was abundantly clear to me based on the questions I received during my conversations with developers.  What does it mean to “develop in the cloud?”  How does the cloud “work?”  How can I get my application in the cloud?  What kind of support does the cloud provide?  The cloud is not always obvious to developers, as even the difference between consuming cloud services and running in the cloud are a bit, well, cloudy.

The major consequence is that the tremendous potential of the cloud for operational efficiencies is not yet a motivation for developers to engage with the cloud.  Which also reveals that PHP cloud developers are still quite a bit removed from the operational aspects of their applications.  This is surprising, because PHP applications are often expensive to operate at high levels of service quality.  Improving on that costliness should be something that is of high interest, then.  But it seems that PHP developers are rather territorial.  They feel they can run their applications better than anyone, and that the traditional approach to running an application on dedicated server nodes is better than alternative platform approaches.  It’s worth pointing out, however, Engine Yard CTO and co-founder Tom Mornini’s statement at a recent GigaOm event: “If you think you can host your application cheaper or better, then your math is way off.”

There were some folks at the conference who were warming up to cloud solutions: the application owners.  They understood and were interested in the potential for operational efficiencies a cloud application platform could offer.  Especially since so many are looking to cloud computing platforms to enable them to become SaaS providers.  The next step, then, is getting the PHP developers to understand that these operational efficiencies that the application owners value are the next frontier in realizing PHP’s full potential: low cost, high speed, maximal value.  Application owners and the operational guys are already on the right track.  We just need to get the developers up to speed with them.