More than two decades ago when the world was busy learning Windows on desktops, Y2K was still a few years away. Being able to open multiple windows on our desktop created a new window of opportunities for those who wanted to do multiple things simultaneously. Desktop computing soared. Microsoft was placed in a different orbit.
As we opened windows in our desktop, Mosaic (Netscape) opened a new window to the world. To the web. Through Netscape browser. 75% market share within a quarter of its release and an IPO within 10 months. The IPO was so successful that it inspired a whole generation of entrepreneurs to start tech business. More importantly, as Thomas Friedman has said – Netscape has made the world flat by democratizing the web.
Open sourcing of Netscape Navigator in 1998 & realization of a handful of geeks about the power of free software led to the extension of open source community (Linux started it, others popularized it). Popularity of web and power of open source brought the building blocks of web application faster – OS (Linux), Web server (Apache), web programming (PHP), database (MySQL), all from open source. The technology geeks received their LAMP, they nurtured it, used it, improved it. The software world loved it.
From Dot-com through Web development to eCommerce applications, LAMP was the guiding light for application development (only change was Java/J2EE taking place of PHP). Till something else happended!
Consumer applications started being part of our lives with mobile apps glued to our palms in post-2007 era. Performance & personalization demanded real time response at the speed of tap, scroll, swipe left, swipe right (multiple fingers on mobile as against one mouse in laptop). Internet scale & resilience has become the opportunity of this era. And this is where cloud started changing the game of computing with its spider web around the world.
Cloud zones, regions, clustering across zones/regions, load balancing, containerized scaling, platform services and now with serverless computing. Leave alone the fact that cloud today stores more than 1 exabyte (1024 petabyte) of data and is scaling beyond that, what is fascinating about cloud is that every layer of cloud is programmable and can be consumed as service.
After working with cloud platforms for several years now, it dawned to me that the new LAMP stack is now running on the cloud.
- L – Linux @Cloud – Cloud is the new Linux – 90% of cloud workload runs on Linux.
- A – App service, API – Applications are hosted on App services or exposed as API.
- M – Managed platform services – Application back-end (old MySQL) now runs as managed platform services. This is the space the cloud providers are competing to differentiate by their new innovative offerings. Learning of application developers in this space is in perpetual beta.
- P – Polyglot programming – Application programming (old PHP) is now Polyglot programming of services deployable in containers. Whatever language you use to write your services, you comply with 12-factor app, you are in!
The company that has opened windows on our desktop has now pivoted completely to the cloud and is now opening new windows in the cloud. They are second only to Amazon AWS in the fastest growing technology computing segment. And for the geeks access to LAMP stack takes 10 minutes (you need just a credit card), service development can happen in 5 days (you need just an internet connection) and deployment in production can happen every day and scale for access by 7B people on earth!
Long live the new LAMP!