Playing Scrabble With the LAMP Stack

By Alex Handy

July 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 5)
LAMP has been shedding light on server architecture for more than 10 years now. Perhaps its greatest strength is the fact that the letters representing Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python can all be scrambled, removed, substituted and swapped around. LAMP can be mixed and matched to suit the needs of an enterprise. But with all that potential for variation, how can an IT organization keep track of the ever-shifting components inside their stacks?

The L in LAMP can be replaced by W, S, F, O and sometimes M. After all, Windows administrators have access to Apache, MySQL and PHP in the WAMP stack. FreeBSD users interested in Perl and PostgreSQL might create a FAPP stack. And now, thanks to Sun’s purchase of MySQL AB, Solaris users might prefer to use Java, yielding a SAMJ stack.

“M can mean MySQL, or it can mean PostgreSQL,” said Ian Murdock, vice president of platforms and operating systems at Sun. “The P can mean Ruby. Why can’t the L mean Solaris?”

Amid all these letters and mixes of possible acronyms, there is a single truth of LAMP, LFPP, WAMP, FAPP and all the other possible combinations: With a four-piece stack based on open-source software, the toughest part of the task can be keeping all the pieces working through varying patches and updates.

Companies like SpikeSource offer stack management and support subscriptions to help keep track of the constantly shifting platforms used in most LAMP stacks, but is this a problem that warrants a third-party solution?

Getting AMP’d Up
Will Whitmill, manager of IT at a health care company with more than 50 offices, said that the solution for his company’s constantly shifting LAMP stacks is a quick dose of diff. “We use a diff engine and SVN [Subversion] for all our config files, so we can quickly and easily find broken configs,” said Whitmill. His company uses Ubuntu-based Linux servers, so updating individual items in the stack is taken care of by the Linux distribution’s built-in package management system.

Related Search Term(s): Linux, server management, Windows

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