PHP Deployment on Cloud Platforms

Also Known As

TL;DR

Explanation

PHP cloud deployment options: EC2/VMs (full control, nginx + PHP-FPM, manual scaling), ECS/Fargate (containerised PHP-FPM, auto-scaling, no server management), Cloud Run/GCP (container on demand, scales to zero), Lambda + Bref (serverless PHP, pay per invocation, cold starts), Elastic Beanstalk/App Engine (PaaS, abstracts infrastructure). For most PHP web apps: ECS Fargate or Cloud Run offer the best balance — containers provide reproducibility, auto-scaling handles traffic spikes, and no server management is needed.

Common Misconception

Why It Matters

Common Mistakes

• PHP sessions on multiple EC2 instances without sticky sessions or Redis — session data lost on each request.
• Local file storage on containers — containers are ephemeral; use S3 for file storage.
• Not setting PHP-FPM worker count for container memory — match pm.max_children to available RAM.
• Bref for long-running PHP processes — Lambda has a 15-minute timeout; use ECS for queue workers.

Code Examples

// PHP on EC2 with local file storage — breaks on scale:
$uploadPath = '/var/www/html/uploads/' . $filename;
move_uploaded_file($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], $uploadPath);
// Works on single server
// Behind load balancer: uploaded file only on one server
// User request may hit different server — file not found

// PHP on ECS Fargate with S3 for files:
// Dockerfile: FROM php:8.3-fpm-alpine
// Files go to S3, not local filesystem:
$s3->putObject([
    'Bucket' => getenv('S3_BUCKET'),
    'Key'    => 'uploads/' . $filename,
    'Body'   => fopen($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], 'r'),
]);
// Sessions in Redis — shared across all containers:
// session.save_handler = redis
// session.save_path = tcp://redis.internal:6379

References

• ↗ https://bref.sh/docs/
• ↗ https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/

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