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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/opensource/0,3800004943,39130613,00.htm

Open source: Where the LAMP stacks burn brightest
Just right for quick, dirty and cheap installations...

By Danny Bradbury

Published: Wednesday 29 June 2005

The LAMP stack is gaining acceptance with businesses but does it have what it takes to overtake its closed source competitors? Danny Bradbury finds out.

Are the best things in life really free? Open source supporters would like us to believe so. For years now, they have been promoting the LAMP stack as a free way to get commercial systems up and running.

LAMP stands for Linux/Apache/mySQL/PHP - a killer combination of operating system, web server, database and scripting engine that has powered many a small ecommerce site.

There's no denying that one of the biggest drivers for the use of the LAMP stack within iStockPhoto was cost, says Patrick Lohr, president of the five-year-old stock photography firm. Lohr's goal as a small start-up was to present cut-price competition to rival the large stock photo companies offering the right to images for hundreds of dollars, selling those rights for a dollar a time. You can't do that without cutting costs.

"I always equate the technical part of what we put together as another piece of the puzzle that fulfils our goal of doing things in a creative and innovative way for a lot less money," he says.

Reducing your capital expenditure on deployments is only one part of the puzzle, however. Companies can incur significant charges during development and design without ever taking a project past the pilot phase. Accomplishing that without investing huge amounts is a critical factor in many LAMP developments. "What businesses need to do is start out and test their business concepts in a way that gets them to market fast, with a proof of concept," Lohr says. "It's what some people call 'fail fast'. If you have an idea that sucks, find out that it sucks fast. That is what the LAMP stack lets you do."

Comments from Bob Shu, chief technical analyst of consultancy Accenture, bear this out. He complains about an emphasis on spending rather than investing in IT, arguing that people are busy patching existing systems rather than developing new ones. Why? He cites Standish Group figures indicating that only 65 per cent of projects are successfully executed - something which doubtless keeps IT managers awake at night.

Enhancing existing systems rather than developing new ones cuts your risk and also reduces short-term expenditure. Theoretically, developing new systems using LAMP cuts your risk by letting you do it on the cheap.

The low cost of development around the LAMP stack also stems from the wider labour base. Open source products are more readily available to people wanting to learn how to program them, meaning that skills are easier to find, explains Corey Ostman, director of new technology initiatives at online shopping comparison company PriceGrabber.

PriceGrabber has been using the LAMP stack since 1999, when the company was founded. "PHP proved to be an excellent choice because of the wide variety of people that we can have working on the GUI aspect of the website," he says.

But there are some potential downsides to the LAMP stack. One significant difference between the open source stack and its proprietary equivalent lies in new features. Companies driven by share price as a business goal rely on growth, which means constantly increasing sales. In turn, this requires them to obsolete their own products. Open source developments, on the other hand, have no such requirement, meaning that the pace of innovation is often much slower.

You won't often find leading-edge innovation in open source products. For example, while Microsoft was developing XML as a native data type in SQL Server, the open source mySQL database finally got stored procedures as a 'new' feature, putting it multiple generations behind its proprietary rival.

Still, why create complex solutions looking for a problem to solve?

"People try to make problems far more complicated than they are," says Malcolm Macsween, managing director of open source development consultancy Enterprise Management Consulting. "We specialise in the opposite thing. You can take a complex problem and reduce it to its simplest."

And anyway, says Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing for mySQL, the trade-off for bleeding-edge features is bloatware. "After 5.0 [of the mySQL database] there will be more enterprise features, but we're pretty judicious in how we add those things," he says. "We don't want people to pay for things they won't use. So we spend a lot of time focused on performance tuning and optimisation. Beyond that we'll have features that support better scale-out and data warehousing, and better integration with online backup."

But scale-out could be a challenge for LAMP users. Using clustered machines or blade servers along with enterprise-class systems like Red Hat Linux makes scaling LAMP systems possible - but it isn't always easy, says iStockPhoto's Lohr.

"PHP saves me money when I'm a little business but ultimately it costs me more when I'm a big business," he complains, adding that whereas enterprise-class systems often force you into best practice, LAMP products let you hack together quick systems. "We've proven that we're successful - now, how do we scale this thing? Had we been built on an enterprise system years ago, we wouldn't be trying to scale the LAMP stack right now. We would be scaling what's already easily scalable."

Others have had different experiences. PriceGrabber's Ostman argues that open source products have matured with his company, adding features that enabled him to increase his transaction handling. "As PriceGrabber grew MySQL added features such as row-level locking with INNODB tables and replication," he says. (INNODB is a type of mySQL table designed for speed and better data integrity.) "The speed of MySQL has allowed us to update our site six times per day and handle real-time transactions from our StoreFronts product."

There's no denying the LAMP stack has its merits but the prevailing wisdom seems to be 'use it with caution'. It has proved an excellent tool for proof of concept business systems and burgeoning commercial systems but needs proper care and attention to be effective in the long run.