WordCamp Sheffield was on Sat 26th of April and was a fantastic local WordCamp, I did a presentation on Going Beyond Lamp, looking at other technologies to either wholesale replace your LAMP stack or compliment it.
Before jumping to the slides and notes, a small friendly reminder, if you took a beer token off me last night, just like the Kings Shilling you made a promise, though fear not it’s not recruitment to the army, but rather to sign up to the newsletter to the left (or on a mobile from the menu at the top) so you best do it now if you haven’t already.
Use the right tool for the job
I can’t emphasis this enough, the most popular is not always the right tool, and thats not just when it comes to server technologies, but Themes, Plugins etc.
It’s very easy for a plugin to become very popular, if evangelised by the right people, and not be any good. So with that in mind, I present alternatives, but it’s for you to play with them and see what will fit your environment.
Direct Replacements
- Nginx – nginx.org
- Percona Server – http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server
- MariaDB – https://mariadb.org/
- HipHop Virtual Machine – http://hhvm.com/
- Hack Lang – http://hacklang.org/
Key Value Stores
- Redis – http://redis.io/
- Memcached – http://memcached.org/
- batcache – http://wordpress.org/plugins/batcache (READ the instructions, it doesn’t just upload and work, also check out http://vip.wordpress.com/documentation/batcache/)
Queue Management Systems
- Gearman – http://gearman.org/
- BeanStalkD – http://kr.github.io/beanstalkd/
- Amazon SQS – http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/
- SupervisorD – http://supervisord.org/ (I didn’t mention SupervisorD but it basically helps manage multiple processes, and is really useful for controlling workers in your queue)
There are millions of queue systems, the above are just a couple examples.
Reverse Proxies
- Varnish – https://www.varnish-cache.org/
- CloudFlare – http://www.cloudflare.com/
- CloudFront – http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
- Using Nginx with Varnish to support SSL – http://mikkel.hoegh.org/blog/2012/07/24/varnish-as-reverse-proxy-with-nginx-as-web-server-and-ssl-terminator/
- Building a CDN using SSL CloudFront certificates – https://timnash.co.uk//building-cdn-ssl-cloudfront-certificates/
Search Engines
- Elastic Search – http://www.elasticsearch.org/
- Solr – https://lucene.apache.org/solr/
- Handy comparison of the two systems – http://solr-vs-elasticsearch.com/
- Bonsai – http://www.bonsai.io/
- Swiftype – https://swiftype.com/