At present, the LAMP stack and most other stacks come with a ton of different dials and switches. For my talk at Web 2.0 Expo I pulled together a slide with just excerpts from configuration files and rapidly filled a screen with lots of arcana from httpd.conf to php.ini (and that’s before you get to the db, firewall, loadbalancer, etc). It is true that you can (sometimes) get a working system just with default config files, but that will be neither secure nor performant. If you want either or both of those you have to start fiddling. The relevant information is spread out across many different websites with often conflicting advice, which is why folks wind up paying for high touch hosting, or hiring a sys admin, or wasting lots of cycles reinventing the wheel. Principle #2 is that cloud computing is (nearly) zero config. Ok, you may have to tell the cloud your domain and a couple more things, but you should be ready to go in minutes. Everything else is just code, freeing you up to spend time on those things that endusers actually care about.
