And for now, check out our site at http://www.hybrid-cluster.com for more info on our platform.

Our company, http://quicloud.com/products has been providing secure LAMP as a service installs for the last month, and it’s been met with pretty good response so far.

By using the Rackspace Cloud offering, we build extremely secure, nicely configured full LAMP stacks for a one-time fee of $200 and a monthly ongoing fee of as low as $20. The security aspect of it is huge — we only open up what you need, we secure every layer of the LAMP stack as much as humanly possible, and we run a Nessus-level scan over everything when we’re done… delivering you a full report of vulnerabilities & how we patched. We can also layer secured versions of WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! on top.

Essentially, the service does about 30-40 hours worth of Sr SysAd / Security Engineer work in just under an hour.

We’re pricing it so that even independent Designers, Developers, and Bloggers can have a secure solution and not waste their time doing something they aren’t trained to do — getting a LAMP stack secured and properly configured for each and every client.

To be clear, I’m not knocking Java here. I was actually a Java engineer for 10 years before I took over Zend Framework; if I thought Java wasn’t a great- if not the best- technology for a wide range of problems, I would have focussed my attention elsewhere sooner. I have no doubt that Google and MS added Java support to woo the very advanced- and very lucrative- Java crowd. And I think it’s a win-win. But they obviously have to decide where to allocate resources, and every developer who’s focussing on Java support in Azure is a developer who’s not focussing on .Net.

All of that said, Java seems to be a much more strategic solution for GAE, if for no other reason than they aren’t investing a ton of resources in building a full enterprise stack with all the bells and whistles like MS is with .Net.

I hope that clears up any confusion about what I wrote above. If I’m not mistaken, we agree fully on this point. :)

Thanks for the feedback in any case.
,Wil

Banks, hospitals and multi-billion dollar enterprises don’t run on LAMP — they run on Java based platforms like IBM and Oracle.

It’s more reasonable to assume that Google wanted to attract seasoned enterprise developers than to suggest that they added Java support against their will.

TJL

“If there are already hundreds of PHP hosters and our apps work perfectly fine on them, why switch?” is the thinking. And this is a perfectly reasonable take on the cloud when you have customers and clients clambering for features and bugfixes.

What PHPers are missing, on the whole, is the value proposition of the cloud beyond hosting. Scalability, availability, dead simple image and instance management. . . the list goes on.

The PHPers I’ve met who have tried cloud solutions are hooked. But how do we get the rest of the PHPers to try it?

,Wil

‘Salesforce.com and VMware recently unveiled a Java-focused platform-as-a-service offering, VMForce.com. Meanwhile, Microsoft has Azure, a PaaS offering focused on the .Net stack, and startups Heroku and Engine Yard both deliver Ruby-on-Rails cloud platforms. But who’s going to offer a PaaS for LAMP?’

I think you’re right on with this list of PaaS providers for specific technologies, and I just wanted to point out that Google could be put down for Python in the same breath.

,Wil