The Bob Bloom Show

The rise of the Lambda, compute service, and general serverless resellers will slowly contribute to moving PHP away from monolithic development. This is the era of Peak PHP Monolith. An epiphany from long contemplation, watching a re:Invent video, and presenting at my local PHP meet-up group.

Incredibly, AWS is not keeping up with its native Lambda runtime updates. One answer is take a page from PHP developers: do it yourself. Yes, it is an answer.

Playing with type one hypervisor software gave me a better sense of cloud servers. So playing with compute service software should give me a better sense of serverless. In the absence of such an out-of-the-box software, instead I conceptualized what such software would entail. My starting point was the type one hypervisor.

Lambda is very accommodating to running PHP monolithic apps. The Lambda home page uses server terminology to describe what it is not. It is very logical for PHP devs to assume that Lambda is a server by another name. However, it is still not a server. With more serverless platforms being introduced into the marketplace, it is important to understand exactly what these technologies are, and to understand our own use cases, in order to best match our needs with a platform.

What is Lambda's Runtime API's "bootstrap" file? To get a first-hand feel for what this vital file really is, I messed around with it. There is a lot of API action going on. And, surprisingly, there is access to the actual Lambda folder and file structure. There appears to be no actual bootstrap stuff going on, in the traditional server sense of the word.

Diving down the Lambda PHP Runtime Rabbit Hole brought me square into something that I have successfully avoided in my two decades of enjoying PHP as my primary language of choice: PHP Internals. And not just avoided, but consciously and actively avoided. But, now, there is really no way to avoid getting involved in the PHP Internals, in some way, when it comes to doing your own PHP Runtimes for Lambda. And, now that I've broke my own barrier to looking at PHP Internals, I am the better dev for doing it. Even more so, I feel I am getting a more intimate understanding of Lambda as a result.

A frustrating aspect of understanding of "serverless" is the term itself. This term conveys what the technology is not, rather than encapsulating what the technology is. There is a silver lining. This term, when taken literally, by describing what the technology is not, profoundly conveys the cultural divide this technology represents.

Amazon Web Services does not directly support PHP for Lambda. PHP devs eager to use Lambda have a shockingly challenging road to travel with Lambda. I say shocking because AWS has directly supported using PHP with its services, but has decided not to do so with Lambda.

Seeking fifteen sponsors to fund seven months of intensive effort to publish much needed free and open source materials about Lambda+PHP, setting up and managing repos for PHP code deployed to serverless platforms, and for the new Digital Ocean Functions.

Found a context with which to understand DynamoDB when I learned about its history.