Zend Helps Companies Tackle Most Common Causes of Application Failure

Zend Server 6 Improves DevOps Collaboration to Support Faster Release Cycles and Avoid Application Issues

Cupertino, CA. - February 12, 2013 — Zend, the PHP Company, is helping companies confront the development and operations collaboration challenge that interferes with the process of developing, launching and managing applications. The latest version of the world’s leading application platform for Web and mobile applications equips companies with the tools and processes they need to avoid today’s most common causes of application failure.

The Truth About Application Failures 

The proliferation of mobile and Web-based apps has made DevOps collaboration more important than ever. Companies have been driven towards continuous delivery releases, in which small changes are released often and the app is tested on an ongoing basis [1]. According to one survey [2], 28% of companies release updates and patches in intervals shorter than every two weeks, while 34% now launch new releases more often than once a month. 

However, it is precisely a lack of DevOps processes that is the Achilles’ heel of the release management process. A survey of more than 730 app development and operations professionals uncovered these worrisome statistics [3]: 

• 75% of application deployments are done manually or with little automation
• 70% of companies say that their application deployments take more than one day
• 56% have experienced apps that work in testing but fail in production.

The challenge is that the leading causes of application failure are directly related to issues that development and operations teams must execute together. These issues include failed software upgrades, inability to scale to meet unforeseen demand, resource exhaustion and configuration errors rate, all of which all rate among the top causes of application failure, according to research from Carnegie Mellon University [4].

In fact, half of development and operations professionals admit missing release dates due to complexity and lack of coordination. Seventy two percent of operations professionals surveyed said that development is not supportive of their goals, while seventy five percent of developers said ops is a roadblock or only somewhat supportive of agile development [5]. 

Zend Server: The Next-Generation App Platform for Web & Mobile Apps

Zend Server is designed to avoid the blamestorming that occurs between development and operations teams, by providing the tools, processes and infrastructure to enable teams to streamline and simplify their collaboration.

Designed to avoid the most common types of application failures, Zend Server provides:

• Faster, less error-prone deployment of software releases, enabled by an automated deployment capability for taking an application from test to production.
• Instant insight into root cause when an app does not perform in production as it did in development; enabled by an approach where development and operations teams can collaborate on problem resolution, with developers having access to production debugging information in a controlled manner (in view-only mode)
• Advanced troubleshooting tools that provide a recorded method-by-method snapshot of the underlying code execution, enabling developers to more rapidly solve problems
• A clear view of every change to production system configurations (an audit trail that gives visibility into who changed which settings and when)
• Visibility and proactive monitoring of application performance trends via performance metric dashboards and custom alerting
• An application infrastructure that flexes to handle variable load by incorporating auto-scaling either on premise or on a range of public clouds
• API based architecture enables integration with a range of continuous integration and monitoring tools, such as Hudson, Jenkins, Nagios, HP OpenView
• Support and the latest security updates for PHP and Zend Framework

“Zend Server gives us real-time visibility and control in the production environment,” said Robert Kerner, SVP and Chief Digital Officer, NYSE Euronext. “It proactively monitors the application, and code tracing acts like a flight recorder, providing root-cause diagnostics so we can resolve issues quickly and definitively. In one example, Zend Server helped us resolve a problem related to SSL in our replicated environment that might otherwise have gone undetected. Within three days of our first site launch, Zend helped us optimize performance by more than 200 percent.”

“Zend Server 6 is like insurance against the most common application issues,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend. “Zend clients have already been able to avoid challenges caused by lack of security patches or support by subscribing to Zend Server. Zend Server 6 takes it to the next level by providing a full toolset to help development and ops teams attack the most common causes of application failure – together. I am particularly excited to be giving back to our development community by offering access to a free version of Zend Server that lets them start receiving the benefit of Zend Server’s advanced troubleshooting, performance diagnostic and debugging capabilities early in the development cycle.”

How Zend Server 6 Benefits Developers and Ops Teams

Developers can build faster apps by leveraging features such as bytecode, data object and URL-based page caching, and the ability to un-bottleneck application code by parallelizing tasks with the Job Queue feature. Wasted time is eliminated through advanced debugging tools, including new web services debugging, integrated across Zend Server and Zend Studio 10 IDE.

For their part, ops teams can use Zend Server 6 to manage and meet their application SLA commitments. They can avoid and resolve errors stemming from configuration issues, via proactive alerting and lockdown of unauthorized configuration changes. Monitoring dashboards enable ops teams to gauge application health at a glance and over time, including the ability to set different caching and monitoring rules for each application. Using performance dashboards, ops can manage and predict performance and peak loads, and rely on Zend Server’s seamless application failover to ensure high availability. 

Zend Server 6, Free Edition

A free version of Zend Server 6 is also being announced, targeted at developers who would like to take advantage of Zend Server’s advanced debugging and performance metrics for development usage. As in the commercial editions, Zend Server free edition includes a certified PHP stack, PHP profiling and debugging. It also features application and server performance charting, tools for application deployment and monitoring, and the ability to manually generate code traces for advanced debugging. As compared to the commercial editions, the free edition has limited data and metric retention periods, no technical support and limited production capabilities.

Zend Framework, the leading PHP application framework, is also available as an integrated component of Zend Server. To learn more about Zend Framework, visit http://framework.zend.com. 

Available On-Premise and in the Cloud

Zend Server 6 is available on-premise or in the cloud. Enterprises can leverage Zend Server with a variety of cloud infrastructure and management software, including IBM Smart Cloud, Amazon Web Services, VMware, Red Hat, RightScale and others. Zend Server can be purchased directly from Zend, through Zend’s channel and cloud partners, and pricing starts under $100 a month on the Amazon Web Services marketplace.

To download Zend Server, visit www.zend.com/server or try it today on the Zend Developer Cloud at www.zend.com/server/phpcloud 

A webinar on February 21st will provide an overview of core Zend Server features as well as a hands-on demonstration by Zeev Suraski, Zend co-founder and CTO. Registration is available at http://www.zend.com/en/company/news/event/1214_webinar-zs6

Zend Server is also available at no charge for developers through RedHat OpenShift 
https://openshift.redhat.com/community/get-started/zend

About Zend Technologies 

Zend partners with businesses to rapidly deliver modern apps across mobile and cloud. Zend helped establish the PHP language, which today powers more than one-third of the web. Zend’s flagship offering, Zend Server, is the leading Application Platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical applications in PHP. Zend solutions are deployed at more than 40,000 companies, including NYSE Euronext, BNP Paribas, Bell Helicopter, France Telecom and other leading brands worldwide. Learn more at www.zend.com.

Sources

[1] ChannelInsider, “DevOps Crisis Starts to Spiral Out of Control,” 19 July 2012. http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/News/DevOps-Crisis-Starts-to-Spiral-Out-of-Control-729127/ 

[2] Replay Solutions “Results of a Survey on DevOpsTrends” 2011.http://www.ittoday.info/Articles/DevOps-2011-TrendsOverview.pdf

[3] IT Business Edge, “DevOps Fued Set to Come to a Head”, 19 July 2012. http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/vizard/devops-feud-set-to-come-to-a-head/?cs=50811

[4] Carnegie Mellon University, “Causes of Failure in Web Applications”, Soila Pertet and Priya Narasimhan, 2005.http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=pdl

[5] Serena, “ITSM Trends 2012 Infographic,” http://www.serena.com/solutions/itsm/itsm-trends-infographic.html