Containers, memcached support, and PHP 7.2

One of the advantages of a fully container-based infrastructure is that we can roll out new versions of containers to support new service versions without impacting current users.

Updates galore

You can now upgrade when you want to, not when we want you to. To that end, we have a couple of updates to offer you, plus new support for Memcached and PHP 7.2-alpha.

For application containers we have added support for the latest versions of Python, Ruby, and Node.js. You can now leverage the latest and greatest those languages have to offer. Just update your .platform.app.yaml file's type line to suit your preference:

• type: "python:3.6"
• type: "ruby:2.4"
• type: "nodejs:6.10"

For the database crowd, we now offer MariaDB 10.1 and 10.2. Both are incremental updates to MariaDB offering better stability and a few new features. Switching is of course easy; just change the version number in your services.yaml file:

mydatabase:
    type: "mysql:10.2"
    disk: 2048

Memcached all the things

Platform.sh has offered and recommended Redis for application cache data for some time. It's robust, fast, and flexible. Some applications don't play nice with it, though, and favor the simpler Memcached caching service. We don't want to play favorites, so we have now added support for Memcached 1.4, on both Platform.sh Professional and Enterprise. Setup couldn't be simpler. Just add the following to your services.yaml file:

cache:
type: "memcached:1.4"

and add a relationship to it in your .platform.app.yaml file. On your next deploy you'll have a Memcached service running that you can connect to and start reading and writing to your heart's content. See the documentation for the few extra details.

Help PHP test PHP

PHP 7.2 is still in alpha, but due out later this year. Now that there are alpha releases available, however, this is a great time to test your applications and make sure they will continue to work properly.

To make that even easier we've added an experimental PHP 7.2 container to Platform.sh. Please do not use it in production yet! PHP 7.2 is not yet finalized and we will not support PHP 7.2 in production environments until it is, but you can try it out on a dev branch easily by setting your type field:

type: "php:7.2-rc"

If you try it out and find something in your application breaks, congratulations, you may have found a bug! Help the PHP development team by reporting it to them so that it can be fixed.

We'll be releasing updates to the 7.2-rc container as new alphas and betas of PHP are released. Once PHP 7.2 is released late this year we'll remove the -rc and offer it as a fully supported PHP version.

OneTwo more things

And finally, we're experimenting with two new languages on Platform.sh: Go and Java. Both are highly powerful and popular languages in server-side programming and service-oriented architectures; you know, the kind of thing that Platform.sh excels at.

For the time being both are only alpha support, and our tools around them are still subject to change. Don't launch real applications with them just yet. If you're interested in being part of our trial program with either language reach out to our sales department and we'll see if we can help you help us help you.

Whew! It's been a busy few weeks. Enjoy your containers!