Our development servers are on Amazons EC2.
We would ideally like the following:
PHP 5.3.x Oracle Drivers mHash mCrypt Apache
Does anyone have a recommendation on a good place to get a stack that would meet most of those needs with a minimum of additional configuration?
For updated base AMI's you can check Ubuntu canonical AMI's found at Eric's site: www.alestic.com.
The Amazon AMI was also release if you prefer CentOS distro. http://bit.ly/a5fcz3
For security reasons, I suggest you build your own LAMP stack.
Of course there are many existing LAMP AMI's you can find.
We are bootstrapping our instances using chef and a service called Scalarium. Depending on what we setup and configure, it takes up to 8 minutes for the instance to become operational.
Feel free to check out my chef recipes, specifically the one for php-fpm: http://github.com/till/easybib-cookbooks/tree/master/php-fpm/
I'm also working on a custom php5 debian package to speed up the PHP installation.