Integration middleware hosting

A small PHP service with no user interface, sitting between other systems. A webhook receiver, a sync between a shop and an ERP, a scheduled importer. Nobody visits it; it exists to move data, and PHP is a reasonable choice precisely because a library for every API it will touch already exists.

# The jobs component is the center of gravity

Two things trigger this service: an inbound webhook and the clock. The jobs component covers both — long-running workers and cron jobs — running in a separate container that shares the codebase, database, and environment variables with the web processes. Each deploy restarts running workers, so background code never lags behind the web code.

The web side exists to catch a payload and hand it off. A middleware app where the web request does the heavy lifting has the proportions backwards, and it shows up as timeouts during the first upstream burst. The queue backend here is MySQL — the database queue drivers in Laravel and Symfony run against the booked component; there's no hosted broker product.

# Failure is silent

Nobody complains when an integration stops, because nobody was watching it. The dashboard keeps a dedicated jobs log next to the web logs, but alerting on absence is something the team arranges elsewhere.

Cost is close to nothing. There's no traffic to speak of and the database stays small, so the bill is one PHP component and the jobs component, aggregated per day of actual use.