Section A.1. What Is a Platform?

A.1. What Is a Platform?

The idea of a platform has gained great currency in technology strategy in the past few years. Most of the time, the term applies to a foundation layer on which other technology can be constructed. Intel's chip set is a platform. Microsoft Windows is a platform. Java is a platform. Much has been written about the rules for constructing and marketing a platform to gain the most control and to squeeze the most profit from its use.

Our perspective on platforms is much more modest. We use the idea of a platform to refer to the collection of software used for development, infrastructure, or applications. The goal is to assemble the smallest, least expensive, easiest-to-maintain infrastructure that meets all your needs.

The challenge in assembling a platform based on open source is that for the most part, no one is designing open source to be a platform. Some open source projects are used together so often that they are treated as a platform: the combination of Linux, Apache, and MySQL with Perl, Python, or PHP is referred to as the LAMP platform. But that doesn't mean it's easy to get a particular version of PHP working well with Apache or with MySQL. In short, the evolution of open source platforms, like open source itself, has left significant holes in the platform that IT departments should be aware of as they decide which open source to adopt.