If you’re a PHP developer building a public-facing Web application, there are a number of good reasons why the cloud should be on your radar. It’s highly scalable, allowing you to quickly scale up if you application turns out to be a hit. It’s cost-efficient, because you only pay for the resources - bandwidth, CPU cycles, memory - you use. And it’s secure, because cloud providers have invested a great deal of time and thought into ring-fencing applications and user data.

However, if you’re new to the cloud or do most of your development locally, getting your PHP application from your local XAMPP box to the cloud can be a bit challenging. That’s where this tutorial comes in. Over the next few pages, I’ll walk you, step by step, through the process of deploying a PHP/MySQL application running on your local XAMPP server, to a cloud server running LAMP packaged by Bitnami. Keep reading!

Before we begin, a few quick assumptions. This tutorial assumes that you have a XAMPP installation with a working PHP/MariaDB application. It also assumes that you’re familiar with the MariaDB command-line client and that you have a working knowledge of transferring files between servers using FTP.

Now, if you’re new to the cloud, you might be wondering what Azure and Bitnami are. Very briefly, Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform, which allows you to easily create Windows (and Linux) virtual servers in the cloud. Bitnami provides pre-packaged server images for these cloud servers, so that you can become productive with them the moment they come online. In short, Azure provides the cloud infrastructure, and Bitnami provides the server images and software.

For this tutorial, I’ll be using LAMP packaged by Bitnami, which is Linux-based and bundles PHP, MariaDB and Apache, together with key applications and components like phpMyAdmin, SQLite, Memcache, OpenSSL, APC and cURL. LAMP packaged by Bitnami also includes a number of common PHP frameworks, including the Zend Framework, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Smarty and Laravel.

To deploy your application to the Azure cloud with LAMP packaged by Bitnami, here are the steps you’ll follow:

The next sections will walk you through these steps in detail.

Begin by creating an Azure account, by browsing to http://azure.microsoft.com and choosing the "Free Trial" option for a one month free trial. You will need an existing Microsoft account to log in and sign up for the free trial; if you don’t have one, you can create one here (remember to keep track of your account username and password, because you’ll need them in the next step).

Once you’ve signed in, sign up for the Azure free trial by providing some basic personal information and your mobile phone number. Azure will send a verification code to your mobile number, which you’ll need to enter into the registration form. Once that’s done, proceed to the next stage by entering your credit card information.

If you’re wondering why you need to provide credit card information for a free trial, or if you’re worried about being billed for services, relax. By default, Azure trial accounts are configured with a spending limit of $0, which means that your card will never be billed unless you remove or modify the spending limit. Azure needs your credit card information for security purposes, to avoid service misuse and to confirm your identity.

Once your payment information is entered, review Azure’s terms of service, free trial details and privacy statement, and indicate your agreement by ticking the box. Then, hit the big green "Sign up" button.

The Azure account registration machine will churn away for a minute or so, and you will then be redirected to your Azure account management page, which allows you to manage your subscriptions, edit your profile and get support. You should see that your free trial is now active in the subscription list.

The next step is to create a Bitnami account, so that you can launch a cloud server with LAMP packaged by Bitnami image. If you have a Google, Microsoft or Github account, you can use your credentials from those services with Oauth to create your Bitnami account.

If you don’t have accounts with those services (or you don’t want to use them), you can use your email address and password to create a Bitnami account, as described below:

Then, use the "Sign up" button to create your account.

Bitnami will send you an email with a verification link which you’ll need to click or browse to, to activate your account. This will also sign you in to your Bitnami account.

The easiest way to set up your Azure cloud server with LAMP packaged by Bitnami is via the Bitnami Launchpad for Azure, which gives you a simple control panel to provision, start, stop and check status of your Azure cloud servers. However, to use it, you must first connect your Azure and Bitnami accounts.

To do this:

The Launchpad will recognize your Bitnami credentials and automatically sign you in.

The next step is to set up an administrative password for the Bitnami Launchpad and connect your Azure account with your Bitnami account.

Select "Virtual Machines" in the Launchpad menu and - since this is your first time - you’ll be prompted to enter an administrative password.

The administrative password offers an additional level of protection against misuse: you’ll need to enter it when performing certain operations, such as creating new Azure server instances. Again, make sure you note it down for future reference.

Next, you’ll be asked to connect your Azure account to your Bitnami account, by transferring a management certificate generated by Azure into your Launchpad account. Although this sounds complex, the Launchpad makes this a simple two-step process.

Your Azure and Bitnami accounts will now be connected.

To provision your Azure cloud server:

The Bitnami Launchpad will now assign the new server a host name and begin spinning it up. The process usually takes a few minutes: a status indicator on the page provides a progress update.

Once the cloud server has been provisioned, the status indicator will show that it’s "running", and the host name specified in the Bitnami Launchpad will become an active link.

At this point, you should be able to browse to the cloud server, either by clicking the link in the Bitnami Launchpad or entering the cloud server host name directly into your browser’s address bar. You should see a welcome page like the one below (just so you know, it’s served up by Apache, which is part of LAMP packaged by Bitnami).

You can now connect to the cloud server and test PHP to make sure it’s working correctly and has all the extensions you need. The easiest way to do this is with PuTTY, a free SSH client for Windows and UNIX platforms.

By default, LAMP packaged by Bitnami includes running Apache and MariaDB servers, and all the packages that come with the stack are located in the /opt/bitnami directory. Most importantly, there’s also a phpinfo.php file in the /opt/bitnami/docs directory, which you can copy to the Apache web server root to verify PHP’s capabilities.

Once the file has been copied, browse to http://[your-cloud-server-hostname]/phpinfo.php and you should see the output of the phpinfo() command.

With this, you know that your PHP installation is configured and working correctly.

You can also check that MariaDB is working: simply launch the MariaDB command-line client by typing 'mysql' at the shell prompt.

The client should start up and connect to the local MariaDB server, displaying a welcome message as shown below.

You should also be able to access phpMyAdmin through the secure SSH tunnel you created, by browsing to http://127.0.0.1:8888/phpmyadmin.

To log in, use username 'root' and default password 'bitnami'.

In case you’d like to troubleshoot errors or modify the configuration for Apache, PHP or MariaDB - for example, adjusting the maximum upload file size in PHP or [changing the path to the MariaDB data directory] - here are the locations for key configuration and log files in LAMP packaged by Bitnami:

Usually, you’ll need to restart your server(s) for your changes to take effect. LAMP packaged by Bitnami includes a control script that lets you easily stop, start and restart Apache, MariaDB and PHP. The script is located at /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh. Call it without any arguments to restart all services:

Or use it to restart a specific service only by passing the service name as argument - for example 'mysql':

Although this is an optional step, it’s best practice to secure your server by changing default passwords and configuring SSH key-based access. For example, the default MySQL installation uses 'bitnami' as the root password, so this should be changed right away, by using the command shown below (replace 'guessme' with your new password):

You can also change the password of the default 'bitnami1' account, as shown below:

You will be prompted to enter the current password, then a new password.

To further secure the server, it’s a good idea to replace SSH’s password-based authentication with key-based authentication. This ensures that only users with access to the correct key can log in to the server.

To do this:

PuTTY will generate the keys and display the public key, as in the screenshot below.

Now, open a new connection to the cloud server by clicking "Open". This time, PuTTY should use the private key to automatically log you in to the cloud server, without requiring you to enter a password.

Assuming it all worked, the final step is to turn off password-based authentication.

At this point, your private SSH key is the only way of gaining access to your cloud server - so keep it safe!

Your cloud server is now provisioned, secured and has a functional PHP/MariaDB environment. All that’s left is for you to transfer your application code from your local XAMPP environment to your cloud server and set up the database.

The easiest way to transfer files to the server is with FTP or SFTP. Although you can use any FTP/SFTP client, I like FileZilla, a cross-platform, open source and feature-rich client. Download it from the FileZilla website and install it using the automated installer - it’s a quick process, only requiring you to agree to the license, choose the components (the default selection is usually fine) and specify the installation directory.

Once FileZilla is installed, launch it and you’ll arrive at the main split-screen interface, one side for your local directories and the other for remote directories.

To connect to the cloud server and deploy your application, follow these steps:

If you’re logged in to phpMyAdmin, you can also import the database schema from your local XAMPP system. To do this, select the "Import" tab of the phpMyAdmin dashboard, select the file containing the schema, and click "Go" to have the tables created in your selected database.

You can also learn more about using phpMyAdmin to back up and restore databases.

Browse to your cloud server’s host name and your application should be active. Here are a few screenshots of the example to-do list application running on the cloud server.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully deployed your XAMPP application in the cloud.

To help you get the most out of your cloud server, Azure makes a number of administrative and monitoring tools available. These help you keep track of your application’s performance in the cloud and optimize your server and software configuration as needed.

To see these tools in action:

Once you do this, you’ll arrive at the Azure dashboard, which lists all your virtual machines and cloud services. Select the cloud server you created with the Bitnami Launchpad to arrive at the dashboard, which provides an overview of CPU usage, disk activity and network traffic over the last hour, 24 hours or 7 days. You’ll notice that the toolbar below the activity monitor provides controls to restart or shut down the cloud server.

You can also use the Azure dashboard to resize your virtual server. To do this:

Azure will resize and restart your cloud server with the new configuration.

You can also define alerts, so that you’re automatically informed if any of the above metrics crosses a particular threshold. To do this:

When the above rule is submitted, Azure will automatically send you an email when your cloud server’s CPU usage exceeds 65%.

You can also monitor the uptime of your XAMPP application, by configuring an HTTP endpoint that is automatically checked from up to three different geographical locations. To do this:

Azure will restart your cloud server and configure the URL you specified as a monitoring endpoint. This will also add new metrics for response time and uptime to your list of available metrics, which you can plot in your dashboard or configure alerts against.

Web application performance problems are hard to debug at the best of times, and more so when your server is in the cloud and running a pre-packaged stack. The responsiveness of your application at any given moment depends on numerous factors: server type, network bandwidth, cloud provider load, database load, caching system in use, application code structure, query structure and various other variables.

If you’re finding that your PHP/MariaDB application’s performance is not up to scratch, here are a few general tips you can consider:

Good luck, and happy coding!

Vikram Vaswani is the founder of Melonfire, an open source software consultancy firm, and the author of seven books on PHP, MySQL and XML development. Read more about him at http://vikram-vaswani.in/.