LAMP is to be replaced by next generation web services by the concept of “cloud computing”

This generation of web services got their start from LAMP – a stack of simple, yet powerful technologies that to this day is behind a lot of popular web sites. The beauty of LAMP is in its simplicity – it makes it very easy to get a prototype out the door. The problem with LAMP is in its scalability. The first scalability issue is fairly minor – threads and socket connections of the Apache web server. When load increases and configuration is not tuned properly you might run into problems. But the second problem with LAMP is far more significant – the MySQL relational database is the ultimate bottleneck of the system.

Relational Databases are just not good at growing beyond a certain capacity because of the way they represent information. And so when you reach a certain scale, they become difficult to manage. A way around it, is a technique called data partitioning. If it is possible to split your data into N independent sets, then you can scale with the LAMP approach indefinitely. But if this is not the case, then your only way is to abandon the relational database for a distributed one. And this is the path through which you break into the clouds.

The Basics of Cloud Computing

The idea behind cloud computing is simple – scale your application by deploying it on a large grid of commodity hardware boxes. Each box has exactly the same system installed and behaves like all other boxes. The load balancer forwards a request to any one box and it is processed in a stateless manner – meaning the request is followed by an immediate response and no state is held by the system. The beauty of the cloud is in its scalability – you scale by simply adding more boxes.

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