Beach is great for keeping your client in the loop about the progress of her project. Since everything is automated, it's easy to deploy a new feature – even if it's just a new button – as soon as it is ready. And because you want to launch a bunch of features at once, your are not deploying to production yet, but use a dedicated staging instance.

As promised by the PHP release team, PHP 7.3.0 was released on schedule as a nice present for St Nicolas' Day. I have been testing the release candidates with Neos and Flow during the last couple of weeks. How did it go?

What’s New In PHP 7.3?

It is a false assumption that, just by moving an application to the cloud, it will run faster. While it is much easier to scale an application there, effects from a weak application architecture, massive amounts of database queries or unoptimized storage usage can actually make things slower. When you run your whole application, including database server, key value store and storage, on a single machine, you won't notice many of the performance issues which surface in scalable environments.

Here's a quick update about a new feature which required quite some shifting behind the scenes. Dealing with domains in Beach now becomes really, really easy.

Say, you'd like to use flatwhite.example.com for your Beach instance. Just go to the "Domains" section in the Beach user interface, and add the domain. At any time before or after adding the domain, you switch DNS to the Beach gateway address.

The summer slowly says good-bye here in Northern Germany, which is a great opportunity to work on some more complex features for Beach. Because – let's face it – the hot season with some 30°C and more up here in my rooftop-office only leaves enough brain capacity for manually sorting PDFs by color.

So, today I am very happy to announce a new inconspicuous feature: Instance Scaling!

Neos & Flow – On a Large Scale