Hello, and welcome to this short lecture covering Amazon Lightsail. Amazon Lightsail is essentially a virtual private server, or VPS, backed by AWS infrastructure, much like an EC2 instance but without as many configurable steps throughout its creation.

Lightsail has been designed to be simple, quick, and very easy to use at a low price point for small-scale use cases by small businesses, development teams, or single users. With its simplicity and small-scale use, it's commonly used to host simple websites, small applications, and blogs. You can run multiple Lightsail instances together, allowing them to communicate with one another. And it's even possible if required, to connect it to other AWS resources and to your existing VPC running within AWS via a peering connection.

It's easy to deploy a new Lightsail instance from a single page with just a few configuration options. Amazon Lightsail can be accessed either via the AWS console under the Compute category, or you can go directly to the Lightsail homepage, which sits outside of the management console and can be found at lightsail.aws.amazon.com.

If you want to launch a new instance, select Create instance, where you can then create your instance all from just one page of options. Nice and simple. First, you need to select your region and availability zone as required as to where you'd like to provision your Lightsail instance. Next, you can select your platform, Linux or Windows based, and then additional blueprint if required. If you don't need a blueprint, you can simply select to use the operating system only. Next, you have the option to add a launch script and a different key pair. The launch script can be a shell script that will run at the time of the launch, much like user data for an EC2 instance. By default, you are provided with a key pair to connect to your instance. However, you can select to choose an alternative one if required. Following this, you must then select your instance plan. This section defines the resources of your instance and how much you're going to be paying on a monthly basis. The price-per-month option shows preset configurations based on memory, processing power, storage, and data transfer. However, you can tab through the corresponding tabs and customize the values of each to meet your needs. As you can see, it's very clear, simple, and obvious as to what you will be paying and the resources you’ll get in return. The instances are charged as an on-demand price, so you'll only pay for the resource when you're using it. The dollars per month price is based on having the instance on continuously, which AWS calculates as 31.25 days multiplied by 24 hours.

The configuration options require you to provide a unique name for your Lightsail instance. In addition to this, you're also prompted to add tags to help organize your resources. Now all of your configuration is complete. Simply click on create instance. As you can see, it's very easy and simple to create your Lightsail VPS compared to the number of different configuration options required when deploying an EC2 instance. Once your Amazon Lightsail instance is up and running, you then have a number of management and monitoring options, which are clear and easy to use.

Connect. This option allows you to connect to your newly created instance using SSH either via inline SSH software provided by Lightsail or with your own SSH software using the key pair provided. The instance is given a public IP to allow you to connect.

Metrics. This allows you to view graphical metrics of your instance, such as CPU utilization and remaining CPU burst capacity. These graphs can be viewed over a number of different time periods, from one hour through two weeks.

Snapshots. This provides a simple way to backup your instance, either manually or automatically each day.

Storage. This provides an overview of your current storage, showing the capacity and the disk path. For example, /dev/xvda. You also have the ability to attach additional disks to your instance.

Networking. The networking tab allows you to view your IPv4 and IPv6 address information along with a very simple virtual firewall, allowing you to control which ports your instance can accept connections from. You can also gain additional information on load balancing your traffic between instances or configuring your instance as the origin for a distribution via a Content Delivery Network, or CDN that is backed by Amazon CloudFront.

Domains. This allows you to register a new custom domain for your instance using Amazon Route 53, or create a DNS zone for an existing domain.

Tags. Here you can configure additional or edit existing tags to help you filter and organize your resources. Key-value tags can also be used to help manage your billing and control access.

History. This provides simple historical information about your instance, such as the date and time the instance was created or when configuration changes occurred.

Delete. When you have finished with your instance, this tab allows you to delete your instance along with any data that was stored in it.

As you can see, Amazon Lightsail provides a lightweight solution for small projects and use cases which can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively with just a few clicks. That brings me to the end of this lecture. I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick introduction to Amazon Lightsail. Thank you so much for your time, and best of luck with your continued learning.

An Introduction to Amazon Lightsail

Prerequisites