Start preparing for your Next Exam | Use coupon – TOGETHER | Avail 30% discount

Understanding Amazon Lightsail

  1. Home
  3. Understanding Amazon Lightsail

Understanding Amazon Lightsail

Amazon Lightsail has been built to offer the ability to launch and manage a Virtual Private Server (VPS) quickly with AWS. Now, when we launch an Amazon Lightsail instance, we can pick the operating system, the developer stack, or application, and the size of the instance that we wish to run. Amazon Lightsail instances come with SSD-backed storage, a publicly accessible IP address, DNS management, and data transfer capability.

Implementing Amazon Lightsail requires creation of instance by choosing an operating system, an application, or a developer stack. Such that the operating system choices for Amazon Lightsail are Amazon Linux or Ubuntu.

Applications and Developer Stack Choices

Some of the application choices for Amazon Lightsail are –

  • Drupal
  • Joomla
  • Redmine
  • GitLab
  • WordPress
  • Magneto
  • Nginx

Some of the developer stacks choices for Amazon Lightsail are –

  • LAMP
  • LEMP
  • MEAN
  • Node.js

Once we choose an application or developer stack, then we pick the instance plan, that helps to determines the number of Virtual CPUs (vCPUs), amount of RAM, amount of disk space, and expected data transfer amounts. The Amazon Lightsail instance is spun up in its own Amazon VPC.

Management

Once the instance is running, we can stop the instance, reboot it, or delete it. Billing stops once an instance is deleted. Managing Amazon Lightsail involves managing the instance itself and managing the guest operating system and application or developer stack. Managing the instance can be done either via the Amazon Lightsail console or the CLI.

Available Metrics

Information provided by Metrics are –

  • CPU utilization
  • Network in
  • Network out
  • Status check failed instance (indicates if the specific instance is failing)
  • Status check failed system (indicates if the underlying AWS hardware is failing)

All of these metrics are offered in one-hour, six-hour, one-day, one-week, and two-week increments.

Networking

Networking gives us information on IP addresses, both the publicly accessible IP address (the address accessible from the Internet) and the private IP address (the address accessible internally). We can change the public IP to become a static IP address.

Costs

Costing for Amazon Lightsail is done on an hourly basis, with the minimum billing increment being one hour. While there is a monthly maximum for each different instance size, it is possible to have additional charges based on the following –

  1. Storage costs of any snapshots that you take and keep
  2. Charges for data transfer in excess of the amount allocated
  3. Any public IP addresses that are not assigned to an instance

Changing Instance Size

Changing the instance size for Amazon Lightsail involves taking a snapshot of the existing instance and spinning up a new instance in the larger size. It is not possible to modify the number of vCPUs, RAM, or SSD size of an individual instance.

Security

Security with Amazon Lightsail follows the AWS shared responsibility model. Access to the compute instance is controlled via AWS tools (specifically IAM), although access to the guest operating system, application, or developer stack is controlled by us. Keeping the guest operating system, application, or developer stack current and patched is our responsibility.

Menu