Zend Releases Zend Server 6.2

A few weeks ago, Zend, announced a new version of Zend Server (Zend Server 6.2). This new version is a major improvement to empower companies to become more agile in their delivery of new applications:

• Blueprint for Continuous Delivery: a broad solution built on the Zend Server platform that is designed to accelerate and strengthen the process of bringing applications from code to production.
• Apigility: an API builder (open-source project) with the goal of providing the world’s easiest way to create and maintain high-quality API-based applications.

Zend Server is the platform at the core of the Zend Blueprint for Continuous Delivery, and provides consistency, automation and collaboration capabilities to each stage of bringing applications from code to production. The Blueprint provides practical best practices to help companies implement each step of the Continuous Delivery cycle, and includes both the Zend Server platform and a set of patterns that codify best practices for Continuous Integration, Release Automation, Infrastructure Automation and Application Management.

Enhanced Infrastructure Automation

The intelligent provisioning of infrastructure is a vital aspect of Continuous Delivery.

Zend Server provides infrastructure automation through automatic provisioning and configuration control for PHP applications, as well as elastic scaling for cloud-based apps.

Zend Server 6.2 has enhanced the application deployment automation workflow by providing the ability to manage and provision virtual host configurations cluster-wide, including specialized support for secure (SSL-based) configurations. As new servers are provisioned, they automatically receive the proper virtual host configuration, and any changes are automatically distributed across the cluster. This removes manual steps from these workflows and provides an additional degree of automation.

“Hosting more than one web site on a server instance is a common use case for our clients,” said Zend Co-Founder and CTO Zeev Suraski. “With version 6.2, we’ve are bringing Zend Server’s powerful automation and synchronization features to the world of Apache virtual hosts and Nginx server blocks.”

Optimized Release Automation

As a platform for Continuous Delivery, Zend Server provides automated deployment capabilities for PHP applications. These include the ability to automatically deploy apps to a cluster of servers, validate dependencies and use rapid, automated version rollback when needed. In addition, Zend Server now provides the ability to maintain multiple versions of a library on a server, so that different apps with different needs can use them without conflicting.

Abstracting reusable code into libraries is a best practice for application design, but also brings with it the problem of ensuring libraries are up to date and standardized across the cluster. The library management capabilities in Zend Server 6.2 help prevent application errors stemming from library version mismatch or being out of sync across a cluster. With version 6.2, Zend Server’s library management capabilities are further strengthened and now allow the option for new libraries to be automatically updated.

These capabilities add to the library of patterns and best practices that Zend has already published as part of its Blueprint for Continuous Delivery, which is available at www.zend.com/blueprint. Patterns and plug-ins easily integrate Zend Server with the most popular Continuous Integration, infrastructure automation and monitoring software. Zend has already published patterns for Continuous Integration with Jenkins, Infrastructure Automation with Chef, shell scripts, and VMware vCloud Automation Center; and for monitoring with Nagios. A set of SDKs is available to enable further custom integrations with any existing Continuous Integration or automation software or process.