Engine Yard acquires Orchestra for added PHP power

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Engine Yard has just inked a deal to buy Orchestra, a platform for deploying, scaling and managing applications in the PHP programming language.

Engine Yard is a leading PaaS for Ruby on Rails applications. The company supports thousands of customers, including such big names as Groupon, BuyWithMe, the Criterion Collection and more. All those apps on Engine Yard’s platform translate to around 35 million CPU hours every quarter.

With the new alliance in place, Engine Yard will also be equipped to handle PHP apps large and small.

“Engine Yard has powered some of the fastest growing businesses in history. With Orchestra and its team of dedicated PHP contributors joining Engine Yard, we’re extending our platform into an adjacent market to help PHP developers achieve the same success,” said Engine Yard CEO John Dillon in a release.

As part of the acquisition deal, Engine Yard will speed up development of Orchestra’s PHP platform by beefing up investment and adding the Engine Yard team’s expertise to the mix. None of Orchestra’s current offerings, including support for customers or current products, will be discontinued.

Orchestra is built on Amazon Web Services. It integrates with the developer’s workflow, automatically scales up and down and supports third-party add-ons.

The Orchestra team includes highly respected PHP experts, all of whom will be joining Engine Yard, and its list of supported projects includes the development frameworks CakePHP and Lithium, PHP component manager Pyrus, PEAR and PEAR2 library repositories and many others.

The combined team will continue to make substantial investments of time and effort in open-source projects in both the Ruby on Rails and PHP communities.

Here’s a video giving an overview of the acquisition:

Image courtesy of Kore Nordmann.

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