I am not a PHP developer, and our php code is all third party apps.

Do you have any write ups on PHP tooling? My feeling is that php tooling has a hard time handling stateless images, you often need to install plugins to php applications with a GUI with no good way to do it in a build process. Config of php applications is always an mix of php.ini and database config, often making monitoring a case of writing custom http requests and html parsing. I am not that happy with Java but there are many things it get right especially in tooling.