Just Enough juju

The cloud may or may not be intrinsically evil, and even if not intrinsically evil it might be evil in most or nearly all of its actual implementations, or at least in its most pervasive commercial implementations.

But admit it. You want it.

Ubuntu is free and easy to install. And Amazon Web Services has a "Free Usage Tier". And the connection between the two is juju:
Getting Started:
https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/getting-started.html
User Tutorial:
https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/user-tutorial.html

Other stuff:
Beginning PHP with Eclipse:
http://www.i-programmer.info/programming/php/463-beginning-php-with-eclipse.html

AWS toolkit for Eclipse:
http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/

PHP and Git on AWS Elastic Beanstalk:
http://acloudyplace.com/2012/03/php-and-git-on-aws-elastic-beanstalk/
"When Amazon announced Beanstalk’s support for PHP I was curious to know what it would look like. So I decided to give it a try. I hadn’t used my AWS account for a while, so I had to do some account setup tasks, configuring command line tools, etc. In this article I will explain how to set up a PHP application in Beanstalk from scratch."

Up and running with Elastic Beanstalk:
http://www.w2lessons.com/2012/03/up-and-running-with-elastic-beanstalk.html
"Elastic Beanstalk isn’t a service per se. Rather it is a collection of existing Amazon services strung together to yield a low maintenance, easy to set up and highly scalable web hosting environment for JVM based applications and recently, Amazon has added support for PHP and Git deployments. Beanstalk is geared at new AWS users as well as companies that have not yet achieved a scale that requires very fine tuning of their infrastructure. Although Elastic Beanstalk is relatively simple to use, a good deal of the challenges you’ll encounter stem from the immediate requirement to make your application work under a distributed environment. For those that have been writing AWS based applications for some time, this is second nature, but for those new to the task, it can pose a number of challenges. The great thing about adhering to the restrictions imposed by Elastic Beanstalk is that it forces you to think about scalability from the outset making your applications more robust and decoupled. This can also be a deterrent as few of us want to invest precious idea validation time writing highly scalable code, but with a good game plan it proves to be less onerous than expected."