[PLUG] LAMP Platform Updating Problems

[Kenneth B. Hill]

I want to thank all of you that have provided me answers to my  
question (e.g., about my challenges with applying various updates to  
the individual LAMP platform tools that result in breaks/bugs in the  
application that my team developed).

This is my first LAMP platform application project; I started it 4+  
years ago. I also have a few other Windows platform web application  
projects that I manage as well. Over the past 4+ years, I am  
realizing that my operations cost of the LAMP platform application is  
well exceeding my operations cost of my other Windows platform web  
applications. Much of this difference seems to be attributed to labor  
time on troubleshooting and debugging problems after an update was  
applied to one, or more, of the various LAMP tools.

I started this LAMP application project 4+ years ago, because I  
wanted to try and move my business away from the Windows platform  
towards LAMP. I thought such a move would lower my costs of doing  
business; however, this does not seem to be my experience. Are there  
others that have this experience?

-Ken


On May 30, 2007, at 1:58 PM, Jennifer Redman wrote:

> Hi Ken,
>
> This can be one of the frustrating aspects of using Open Source  
> software in
> production.  Disparate development teams don't have to make sure  
> everything
> works with everything (which would be impossible) and sometimes  
> upgrades
> break seemingly unrelated pieces of software.
>
> However, some distros  come pretty close to solving this issue -- by
> offering "stable"  package collections.  Everything is tested and  
> works
> together.  Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, Centos, and Suse follow this  
> practice.  You
> lose some of the flexibility of running Gentoo -- but at least  
> applications
> "should" continue to work together without feature loss, when  
> recommended
> updates are rolled out.
>
> Another option is to make sure you test all upgrades including  
> patches on a
> staging environment first -- and closely review whether or not you  
> "really"
> need the patch and at the same time review all the potential  
> dependencies,
> and then fix all the problems before rolling to production -- can  
> take a lot
> of time though.
>
> Jen
>
> On 5/30/07, Kenneth B. Hill <KEN at scottshill.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have a been leading a development project of a database app that is
>> built on a LAMP-variant platform (it uses Gentoo Linux, Apache,
>> PostgreSQL AND PHP) along with some CPAN perl modules and MapServer.
>> We seem to have problems with updates to the individual LAMP tools
>> not working with the other LAMP tools. For example, if we update
>> Apache with a security update, then we experience with features in
>> the app not working in a perl mod or PHP etc.
>>
>> I recently got back from a business trip, and I sat next to someone
>> on the airplane that does LAMP database application development. I
>> shared with him this experience, and he agreed with me that this is
>> an underlying problem with developing in a LAMP environment/platform.
>> This results in increasing our labor/time costs in maintaining the
>> infrastructure of the application. I would like to hear other
>> experiences with this issue - if any.
>>
>> -Ken
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