Symphony.

I found this PaaS: fortrabbit . It has all the good stuff (scalability, writable storage, git deployment, ssh access) .... Except XSL support, at the moment.

Their policy is that at least some people have to ask for a module to be supported, so i thought there might be more Symphony users interested in these guys.

You can find all the info on their site and send them a support question to ask for XSL support.

Hi,

i'm a co-founder of fortrabbit. I must admit Symphony was completly new to me. We are looking forward to support XSLT in the future, if it's highly requested by the crowd.

We will test the php-xsl module on our dev environment and if everything works well, we put it on the production stack.

Please check out our platform at http://fortrabbit.com and tell us what else you are missing.

Not to detract from the primary point of this thread - but might also be worth checking out http://www.soario.com/hosting/ as well - Soario being the commercial leg of Symphony.

+1 for XSLT support. I would be interested in trying out the fortrabbit platform. It's definitely good to have more options available.

Agree - the more XSLT support out there the better!

I just tested it and it works like a charm! +1 for the fact that it has persistant storage by default and it requires 0 (yes, as in no) extra configuration or S3 bucket misery! And it still retains scalability.

Impressed!

I haven't tested fortrabbit, but it looks very very cool. They are from Germany, btw. :-)

Especially distributing instances across avaialabilty zones is interesting. But I think that there will be legal implications here in Germany when saving any kind of user data outside of the European Union. If I find the time, I'll try and find out more about this potential issue. (No problem for the rest of the world, though.)

@michael-e

There are 3 AWS availability zones in europe. We distribute nodes of one stack only in one region. For now its EU1-WEST. In the future US and Asia will follow.

Ah, thanks for the clarification!

we are looking forward to provide xsl support next week on http://fortrabbit.com

i will let you know

Thanks for looking into adding XSL support. Fortrabbit looks like a promising solution.

It works.

Please make sure to use the latest dev release to avoid PHP 5.4 issues. And remove this option in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks -Indexes

Awesome, will check it out for sure!

Have you guys already seen this?

That's the sort of thing we need to help with Symphony adoption!

Is anyone already using Fortrabbit with Symphony in production or for a currently developed project. What are your experiences so far? Or is anyone using Soario's Standing Cloud offering?

@jens, I've tried to run a mirror of my production website on FortRabbit, but because of the networked file system it was very, very, very slow. On my VPS the entire page rendered in about 400ms, whereas on fortrabbit it took over two seconds.

We (the very helpful folks at fortrabbit, mostly:)) have tried to find the bottlenecks, but never reached the point where we were happy with the performance.

I really hope that the bottleneck is something simple and easy to fix, as I really like their platform and their customer support is as good as it gets!

but because of the networked file system

What do you mean by networked file system?

Has it something to do with Symphony's architecture, or is this a problem in general? Have you also tried similar cloud hosting providers?

Networked File System ;o)

What do you mean by networked file system?

Has it something to do with Symphony's architecture, or is this a problem in general?

Ah, sorry, sometimes I forget I've had to read stuff to know what is going on, and assume everybody else already knows...

Basically it comes down to this: because Fortrabbit uses more than one server to serve the requests, and the data uploaded to one server must be available to all other servers immediately and transparently (this is a consequence of the "persistent data" feature!) they've chose to have a separate server running the storage, and letting multiple webservers connect to it for their data.

However, as you can imagine the NAS isn't nearly as fast as a local HD. In most cases this is not a problem, since APC will cache included PHP files, so they have to be read only once, and most other data is data where a few miliseconds extra latency doesn't really matter, like images and stylesheets.

Now comes the problem: XSLT is not cached by APC, so everytime you import a stylesheet, it has to actually fetch the document over the network. In my case I am loading quite a few utilities, where some again load utilities that again load utilities...

Have you also tried similar cloud hosting providers?

Yes, I've tried appfog, EC2, heroku and a few others. Because none of them really support persistent data, the problem isn't as apparent there.