Zend Releases Zend Server 6.2

New Capabilities Support Zend Blueprint for Continuous Delivery, enable Intelligent Provisioning of Application Infrastructure

ZendCon Europe Conference, Paris, France.—November 19, 2013—Building on the announcement of the Zend Blueprint for Continuous Delivery, Zend today announced a new version of Zend Server with strengthened capabilities for infrastructure and release automation.

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 Zend Server 6.2 can be downloaded today 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.

Zend welcomes contributions both to the blueprint which can be accessed at GitHub.

Zend Server 6.2 can be downloaded today at www.zend.com/server.

About Zend Technologies 
Zend partners with businesses to rapidly deliver modern apps across mobile and cloud. Zend helped establish the PHP language, which today powers over 200 million applications and web sites. Zend’s flagship offering, Zend Server, is the leading Application Platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical applications in PHP. Zend solutions are deployed at more than 40,000 companies, including NYSE Euronext, BNP Paribas, Bell Helicopter, France Telecom and other leading brands worldwide. Learn more at www.zend.com.