Anifowose Tobi

It was an absolute honor to stand on the stage at PHPConnect '25, the largest gathering of PHP developers in Nigeria, organized by the incredible team at PHPTalks.

As a software engineer at Tightline Software and a contributor to PHPSandbox.io, being invited as a main speaker to share my insights with such a vibrant community was a milestone experience.

Beyond the sessions, the conference was a masterclass in community building. I spent the day connecting with brilliant developers, sharing our collective "growth pains," and listening to wonderful topics from some of the best minds in the industry. Whether we were discussing architecture or bonding over being Liverpool fans, the energy was undeniable.

My Talk: Rethinking PHP for Cloud-Native Environments

My session focused on a critical transition many of us face: moving from traditional legacy setups to the modern, containerized world.

The Journey from Legacy to Cloud

I shared the story of "Bob," a developer who started with the classic manual server setups—XAMPP, LAMP stacks, and FTP uploads. While that worked for a time, scaling a modern application requires a "game changer": Cloud and Containerization.

Containerization allows us to build once and run anywhere, but it requires a total "reality check" regarding how we write our PHP code. Because containers are ephemeral (they disappear and restart constantly), we have to rethink the fundamentals of our applications.

Key Cloud-Native Solutions

During the talk, I broke down how to handle the challenges of distributed environments:

Session Management: Instead of the default filesystem, we must use shared storage like Redis or a database so sessions persist across multiple containers.
Persistent Storage: Since container filesystems are temporary, we must move to external platforms like AWS S3 or use NFS mounts for any files that need to survive a restart.
Centralized Logging: Stop writing logs to files that disappear. Instead, log to stdout/stderr and use collectors like the ELK stack or Fluentd.
Separation of Concerns: Follow the "Single Process Rule." Your web server, queue workers, and cron jobs should all live in independent containers.

PHP is King

The core message was simple: by embracing the 12-Factor App methodology, PHP isn't just "supported" in the cloud—it thrives. PHP is perfectly suited for high-performance, resilient, and scalable cloud environments when designed with these modern principles in mind.

View the Full Presentation

I’ve made the full PowerPoint deck available for those who want to dive deeper into the code examples (including Laravel-specific implementations) and the architectural diagrams.

Link to PowerPoint: Rethinking PHP Development for Cloud Native Environments