As we covered last week, Zend Technologies, whose founders created the PHP language, just got another $9 million in funding. As GigaOM notes, Zend is a big player in the attempt to simplify integration between PHP applications and cloud services. In fact, Zend may play a critical role in building out the LAMP cloud. A LAMP-stack focused cloud platform makes a lot of sense, and it's worth reading about the reasons why. Check out many of them, in this post.