Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/introducing-pagoda-box-paas-just-php/
In this article, we’ll take a look at Pagoda Box, another PaaS (Platform as a Service). If you have used other PaaS in previews projects, Pagoda Box is similar to Heroku. Pagoda Box is PHP only (for now) and has a well defined architecture to start developing with PHP. Everything in Pagodabox is a component. The database is a component, the webservers, workers, cron jobs and the caching. Having such an architecture doesn’t only give you ease in development but also a control over money usage. This post will be a quick overview of this platform. We will set up a framework and look at a list of pros and cons, comparing it to Heroku.
Quick overview
Lets have a look at the components that Pagoda Box offers.
The first and the most important component is the Web Component. This component holds all the code and runs it on each request. This is the entry point in the application. You can have up to 25 instances of Web Components. You can chose from 200MB up to 1GB of RAM for each. In total, you can have 25GB per application. One Web Component with 200MB is free.
The database component doesn’t need an introduction. The only database that you can use for now is the MySQL database. You can chose one of two flavours, Cloud MySQL and Private Cloud MySQL. Only the Cloud MySQL has a free basic plan with 10MB of RAM. It can be scaled up to 500MB for one instance and the Private Cloud MySQL goes up to 16 CPU Cores, 16 GB of RAM, and 300 GB of storage.
The Caching Component comes in Redis and Memcached flavors. Both provide a free basic plan of 10MB. Both of them have only the Cloud version – no Private Cloud.
Pagoda Box also offers Cron Job components, Shared Writable Components (with a 10MB free plan) and SSL.
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