Today at ZendCon, we announced phpcloud.com including the new Zend Developer Cloud. Welcome to our sandbox — a great way to get started and develop great apps. You can take a tour, request your invite, and start developing. There’s no installation, no need to build a PHP stack or spend time maintaining a PHP environment. You’re just a few clicks away from productive coding in Zend Developer Cloud, and it’s free.

Plus - get ready to collaborate in the cloud. You can create containers and snapshots of your app stack so dev team members can join at whatever point you are on a project, and collaborate productively at the source code level, easily sharing code or a whole stack, with Git integration to help manage source files.

Today we also announced the Zend Application Fabric which provides you with an elastic production platform with a complete PHP stack, including PHP runtime, a full range of extensions, and Zend Framework. Zend Application Fabric is powered by Zend Server so you’ll have proactive application monitoring and code tracing to help you find and fix issues quickly without having to recreate them – and less time troubleshooting means more time coding. And if you develop on the Zend Developer Cloud, your code will be ready to deploy to any cloud that supports the Zend Application Fabric. This already includes Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and IBM SmartCloud – and more will be added over time. Or you can run your apps on-premise with Zend Server, and take advantage of fully automated on-premise deployment and delivery benefits.

Check out the Zend Developer Cloud Technology Preview. We hope you’ll provide feedback, and tell others about your experiences with phpcloud.com. With several hundred developers already accessing the developer cloud, we’re just getting started, and we know there’s a lot of imagination and talent in our PHP community ready to harness the power of cloud computing. Please let us know what you think.