LAMP is an earlier model of a Web service suite that is named after the original four open source components: 

• Linux operating system
• Apatch HTTP server
• MySQL / MariaDB relational database management system
• PHP server side CGI programming language

LAMP components are largely interchangeable and not limited to the original assembly. As a solution package, LAMP is suitable for creating and serving dynamic websites and web applications.

The model has been adapted to other components since its inception, although it typically consists of free and open source software. A similar, equivalent collection of software made for Microsoft Windows operating systems is known as WAMP. And its manager on MacOS is called MAMP.

Originally known through the terms "Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP," the acronym "LAMP" today refers to a generic software package model. The components of the package may change in the meantime, but this particular software combination has become popular because they are sufficient to serve a wide variety of common CMS systemsuch as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. The components of the LAMP package can be found in the libraries of most Linux distributions.

High availability and resource allocation

Web sites that serve a large number of requests, or Web applications that offer services that require high availability, require special solutions. The high-availability approaches in the LAMP package can include multiple web and database servers, combining the logical grouping of resources provided by each server and load sharing across multiple servers. Web servers can be resourced by placing a load balancer in front of them, such as using a Linux Virtual Server (LVS). Database servers use MySQL's internal replication mechanism to distribute the load, which uses a master / slave connection between the main database and its copies.

Such high-availability assemblies can improve the availability of LAMP instances by providing various forms of redundancy. This allows a certain number of components (a separate server) to shut down without interrupting all of the services provided by LAMP instances. Such redundant configurations can also handle hardware failures that lead to data loss on individual servers because they prevent the actual loss of shared data. Such high-availability LAMP assemblies are able to almost linearly improve the performance of services where the number of database read operations far exceeds the number of write / modify operations.