About the Professional Stack

The Professional Stack is made for modern PHP development workflows building modern web applications. It subscribes to the 12-factor design paradigms. Also see our stacks article for more options.

Specs & limits

Please visit our specs page to see some hard numbers.

Scaling

Professional Apps are designed to be scalable. Any Professional App consists of multiple Components: PHP, MySQL, Memcache, Object Storage. Think of Components as micro services. Some Components are integral — meaning: you can't turn them off — while others are optional. Each Component is individually scalable, allowing you to increase the resources where needed instead of having to pay for additional resources you don't need. Some Components are capped to an upper limit, but other Components can be scaled virtually infinitely.

Target audience

To work with Professional Apps, you need to be familiar with modern patterns and workflows like: file system abstraction, caching, Git, Composer. If that matches your skill set, then the good news is: We offer the perfect infrastructure for you.

Application types

It's less a question of application type and more a question of underlying frameworks/CMS. Not all are up2date in terms of modern PHP development. Some do not support storage abstraction, others are hard to combine with Git-only deployment. Either way: Most maintained frameworks/CMS are moving towards support of 12-factor environments, so that developers using them can leverage truly scalable infrastructures as well. To name a few of those frameworks/CMS which are easily usable:

• Laravel (since 5.0)
• Symfony (since 2.3)
• Drupal (since 8.2)
• Craft (since 2.5)

Ephemeral storage

Ephemeral storage is a concept of the 12-factor model, which says: Whenever you deploy new code changes, all (since your last deploy) generated runtime data will be deleted. The best example for runtime data are user uploads.

This behavior sounds harsh on first reading, but makes sense if you dig deeper: Allowing to scale your App to high degrees implies that the App's resources must be horizontally scaled. Horizontal scaling, in contrast to vertical scaling, is the technique of adding more resources (more servers), instead of using bigger resources (bigger servers).

To allow an App to scale horizontally means that it runs on multiple servers on the same time. Those servers do not share a storage, and all solutions which would allow sharing storage, would need to build on a network storage, which is infamously slow by nature. To still allow persistent runtime data, your App needs to use an cloud storage, like our Object Storage or S3 from AWS or equivalent.

You still can use the regular file system, e.g. for temporarily storing uploads, but upon every deploy your App will only consist of your deployed code.

The filesystem … can be used as a brief, single-transaction cache. For example, downloading a large file, operating on it, and storing the results of the operation in the database. The twelve-factor app never assumes that anything cached … on disk will be available on a future request or job … a restart (triggered by code deploy, config change, or the execution environment relocating the process to a different physical location) will usually wipe out all local (e.g., memory and filesystem) state.

Only Git deployment

Universal Apps offer Git, SSH and SFTP deployment. With Professional Apps you only deploy with Git. That means you have no longer direct file access to the actual "webspace" of your App.

File system access

Universal Apps have a persistent storage: you have access via SSH and any changes the App writes to the file system are permanent. Hence: You can use web based uploads and those uploaded files will stay there until you remove them.

With ephemeral storage it's different: On each Git deployment, all files of your App will be replaced with the files of the deployment. Files which are not part of the deployment will be removed. In other words: your App can, but should not write any relevant data (user uploads) you might want to reuse later to the local file system. Instead, you need a different solution:

We provide an additional Component to store user uploads, static assets and any other kind of runtime data offshore. It's called Object Storage and comes with additional benefits. It's mostly compatible to AWS S3, so you'll find easy to integrate it to your CMS and framework. File-system abstraction is the key. Please see our Object Storage article for more.

Logs

As a result of the horizontal scalable resources and the ephemeral storage, logs can only be accessed live.

High availability

Most plans are available as Development and Production. All Production plans, and those which are not grouped into either, are highly available.

Atomic deployment

Universal Apps offer a synchronization Git deployment mode: the Git repo contents get rsynced file by file. Per default this is non-destructive, new files will be created and changes files will overwrite existing files, but no files will be deleted (overwrite but not delete).

The Professional Apps deployment process is atomic. That means that a completely new release package will substitute the old one on every deploy. We have made a behind the scenes video showcasing what is happening in the background. The atomic deployment also features a more robust build process: your code will only be released if all scripts (composer install, optional pre- and post-deploy scripts) succeed.

Network security

Security groups restrict access to systems from external networks and between systems internally. By default, all access is denied and only explicitly allowed ports and protocols are allowed based on business requirements. Each system is assigned to a firewall security group based on the system’s function.

Load balanced Apps (Production & Dedicated PHP plans) benefit from AWS Shield Standard - a managed DDoS Protection service provided by AWS, which protects against common DDoS attacks (e.g. SYN floods, ACK floods, UDP floods, Reflection attacks). Additionally you should consider using a Web application firewall like Cloudflare.