In a move that is likely to dramatically increase the number of workloads running on the Microsoft Azure cloud, Zend today announced that its PHP application development platform is now available on the Microsoft public cloud.

Zend CEO Andi Gutmans said making Zend available as a platform that organizations can simply invoke through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace should significantly increase the number of developers building PHP application on the Microsoft cloud. While anybody in theory can load the Zend Server on any public cloud they want, Zend has integration at the marketplace level with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, said Gutmans.

The 8.5 version of Zend Server running on Azure is significant because Gutman said that version is the most advanced in terms of building a community around the PHP platform. For example, Zend Server 8.5 includes support for a Zend Gallery aggregates and organizes all Zend Server plugins underneath a common user interface. Developers can now more easily access the growing ecosystem of Zend Server plug-ins as well as extensions to the Z-Ray automated debugging tools that Zend created for PHP developers. Specifically, support for plugins for Joomla, Doctrine2, Redis, OPcache, MariaDB, and LoS Modules, WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Zend Framework, Apigility, Laravel and Symfony are all included in version 8.5 of Zend Server.

While PHP may not be considered one of hottest programming languages around these days it is the workhorse of application development on the Web. With multiple thousands of developers schooled in developing applications using PHP the community surrounding those developers is crucial for cloud service providers that need to host large numbers of workloads to create the economic efficiencies required to compete at scale. As such, the alliance with Zend, which was first announced earlier this year, is a critical component of Microsoft’ overall plan to compete head to head with AWS.

For Zend, the alliance with Microsoft and AWS are equally critical as more organizations seek to move more workloads into the cloud. In order to maintain the loyalty of those developers it’s in the best interest to make invoking Zend Server on those public clouds as simple as possible.

Meanwhile, for solution providers across the channel that have already invested in acquiring PHP developer skills having Zend Server available on a public cloud should not only reduce the cost of standing up an application development environment in a way that should not only increase the number of projects they can develop simultaneously, but also the overall profitability associated with building and then deploying those applications.