Application and system administrators today are living in a world of ever-more-rapid iterative releases. Without the right processes and tools to ensure ops and dev are on the same wavelength, deployments take longer, more production issues crop up, and those issues take longer to solve. On the other hand, organizations that have solved their devops collaboration challenges are able to deliver high-performing apps as rapidly as business demands.

Zend Server provides an application deployment mechanism that packages up code, scripts, and metadata for rapid and consistent deployment via wizard or API. Application problems can be solved much more quickly with Zend Server’s production code traces, which capture line-by-line PHP request execution of incidents. And by giving development read-only, permission-controlled access to code traces, incidents can be resolved without wasting time trying to reproduce them.

The core responsibility for any operations team is to provide application availability. Poor performance – or even worse, downtime – potentially results in dissatisfied users, lost revenue, and very unhappy management.

Use Zend Server to see a dashboard view of application and server performance and utilization, with historical trend data; or use its API to integrate monitoring data with other tools like Nagios. Monitoring and performance rules can be fine-tuned to the requirements of any given app, giving you true application control. And session clustering allows multiple PHP servers to work together to provide failover support, preventing downtime.

When a security vulnerability is discovered, how do you know about it? What is your method for ensuring your systems are always patched? What about changes to your system, made by someone assuming that their tiny little change couldn’t possibly hurt anything?

Zend Server gives you the peace of mind of knowing that your PHP systems are well-controlled. The audit trail provides a complete record of who made what change, and when. Unauthorized settings changes are prevented, and settings can be backed up and re-imported. Furthermore, Zend, the PHP Company, provides long-term support and security hotfixes for even end-of-life PHP versions.

Seeing your applications used by a broader audience than originally anticipated can inspire both delight and panic. While it’s delightful to see demand increase, managing that demand can be panic-inducing if you and your systems aren’t properly prepared.

Zend Server allows you to scale up or down effortlessly, on premise or in public/private/hybrid clouds. Performance metrics and utilization data give you the information you need to plan ahead, and adding application capacity is simply a matter of Zend Server applying configuration settings, setting up session clustering, and provisioning the app onto the new nodes. And when load spikes are too sudden to plan for, you have the ability to auto-scale and add capacity just when you need it.