PHP is one of the most popular programming languages on the web. It powers many widely used content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, and provides the backbone for modern server-side frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. Despite its popularity, PHP has a bit of a reputation for being slow and hard to maintain. It has gotten better in recent years, but there are two features that high-performance PHP applications will likely need: OPcache and PHP FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM).

Editor's note: This blog post was originally published on relay.sh. Today we announce Relay, an event-driven automation platform. Sign up now and try it out! Relay connects infrastructure and operations platforms, APIs, and tools together into a cohesive, easy-to-automate whole. Relay is simple enough for you to start automating common, if-this-then-that (IFTTT) style DevOps tasks in minutes and powerful enough to model multi-step, branching, parallelized DevOps processes when the need arises.

IT professionals talk about automation… sometimes ad nauseum. We generally understand its value, even if we’re tribally divided by the specifics of its application. For civilians, automation is a catch-all for using technology to wield skills and abilities outside their experience (like placing an order through a complex infrastructure) and access the world of vendors and goods they wouldn’t have time to connect with on their own.

Ansible has become one of the most popular tools used by operations teams to automate their IT tasks. It allows them to quickly, and at the largest enterprise scale, manage the configuration of their IT systems. This includes software and infrastructure on-premise and in the cloud. Its open-source roots has allowed it to grow a large global community with an equally expansive ecosystem of integrations.

The number of publicly available Helm charts is continuously growing and while this is great for the community, it can be challenging to navigate the vast sea of Helm charts and Helm chart repositories. Like a ship’s captain, you need more than just a list of where you can go, but the details to ensure those under your charge arrive certainly and safely. Not just what can be seen on the surface, but what lies underneath, and the hazards that await.