In my last post I asked whether “PHP is easy, is it a boon or bane?” because it is easy, most of the developers just develop systems but never pay attention to the architecture of the system on which they are developing. They never ask questions like “is the system stable?” or “will it be able to handle a lot of concurrent users?” or “is my code optimized enough for as the system required?” or “is the system that is holding my application and data designed well to ensure a better user experience?” or “is the system righteously architected / designed?”. Honestly I never asked myself a lot of these questions until I started working in Cloud Computing Environments, all that bothered me is the efficiency of my code, efficiency of my SQL queries, normalization status of my database, whether I need to de-normalize, finding solutions writing less numbers of lines of codes or single complex SQL JOIN queries, browser compatibility, etc, etc.

Encountering Cloud came as a shocker! I thought I knew fairly well about developing applications using LAMP stack, well I did know but what didn’t know was using LAMP stack on Cloud and what the architecture my cloud environment should have in order to sustain large volume of concurrent traffic. Also how should I write my SQL queries, how should I break a complex SQL query into multiple simple SQL queries and how should I complement complex database routines by PHP code. [Read more…]