Microsoft Azure now supports PHP and allows full trust development
March 24, 2009 by MK
Filed under Online Media, web development
Microsoft at the Mix09 conference on Wednesday revealed several moves intended to bolster its Windows Azure cloud computing platform, adding support for PHP application development and native code as well as full trust capabilities.
Some important highlights of the announcements at conference -
- Managed code to native code support
- Enablement of full trust, which is how most applications or services are written
- Offering FastCGI support to allow PHP development
"Basically, the Windows Server team has done a ton of work with FastCGI that allows Windows Server to now support programming languages beyond just .Net and Visual Studio," said Prashant Ketkar, director of product marketing for cloud infrastructure services at Microsoft, in an interview at the conference in Las Vegas.. Through the FastCGI interface, developers can take existing PHP skills and PHP applications and services and run them on Azure.
Microsoft’s vision is to open up the platform to more languages, Ketkar said. Microsoft wants Azure to offer a "frictionless" development platform beyond just supporting .Net development, he said.
With full trust capabilities, Microsoft is expanding Azure beyond the medium trust capabilities that it had had since its original launch at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October 2008.
What will FastCGI support do?
FastCGI allows developers to deploy and run web applications written with 3rd party programming languages such as PHP. This provides developers using non-Microsoft languages the ability to take advantage of scalability on Windows Azure.
From Azure’s official website -
One of our goals for MIX was to give our developers more flexibility while ensuring they still benefit from the unique time-saving deployment, monitoring, and management features of Windows Azure. One way in which we went about this was to enable IIS FastCGI module in the Web role. This module enables developers to deploy and run applications written with 3rd party programming languages such as PHP.
Now this is the good news for PHP developers. Probably we can see some fellow blogger’s moving there blog hosting to Windows Azure with there PHP built blogs in WordPress and Drupal (depending on the cost though).
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This is a good strategy for microsoft and its very nice of them to embrace open source … at least in the cloud.
I will wait and watch to move my blog though and I am sure it will need some development too to be compatible with AZURE API’s.