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Amazon Lightsail Documentation

Amazon Lightsail provides a number of features designed to help make your project quickly come to life. Designed as an easy-to-use VPS, you can use Lightsail as a one-stop-shop for all your cloud needs. Take a look to see how we can help you get started on a virtual private server on AWS infrastructure.

Lightsail virtual servers

Lightsail offers virtual servers (instances) that are designed to be easy to set up and have the power and reliability of AWS. Lightsail is designed to help you launch your website, web application, or project quickly, and manage your instance from the intuitive Lightsail console or API.

As you’re creating your instance, Lightsail is designed to let you click-to-launch a simple operating system (OS), a pre-configured application, or development stack - such as WordPress, Windows, Plesk, LAMP, Nginx, and more. Lightsail instances are designed to include a built-in firewall allowing you to allow or restrict traffic to your instances based on source IP, port and protocol.
 
Once your instance is running you can create custom alarms and be notified by email or text message when something is out of the ordinary.

Object storage

Store your static content such as images, videos or HTML files in an object storage that can be used for your websites and applications. Lightsail object storage can be associated to your Lightsail CDN distribution with a few simple clicks, making it quick and easy to accelerate the delivery of your content to a global audience. It can also be used as a low cost, secure backup solution.

Simplified load balancing

Lightsail’s simplified load balancing routes web traffic across your instances so that your websites and applications can accommodate variations in traffic, be better protected from outages, and deliver a more seamless experience to your visitors.

Additionally, Lightsail load balancers are designed to include integrated certificate management, providing free SSL/TLS certificates that can be provisioned and added to a load balancer in just a few clicks. You can request and manage certificates directly from the Lightsail console.

Managed databases

Launch a fully configured MySQL or PostgreSQL database quickly and leave the maintenance to Lightsail.
 
Lightsail managed databases are designed to let you scale your databases independently of your virtual servers, improve the availability of your applications, or run standalone databases in the cloud. You can also deploy multi-tiered applications, all within Lightsail, by creating multiple instances that are connected to a central managed database, and a load balancer that directs traffic to the instances.
 
Lightsail managed database plans bundle together memory, processing, storage, and transfer allowance into a single monthly price.

Containers

Lightsail is designed to offer an easy way to run containers in the cloud. With Lightsail Container Service, customers can now run containerized applications and access them from the internet with just a few steps.

Lightsail Containers is designed to enable customers to run docker containers on the cloud right from their developer workflows. Lightsail creates containers from the Docker images pushed by the developers, while we take care of the infrastructure management complexities.

Upgrade to EC2

As your cloud ideas expand, Lightsail is designed for you to easily move to EC2 with a simple, guided experience. With this feature, Lightsail offers you the comfort of knowing that as you grow your website or application we can help you scale in a way that fits your needs.

Upgrading is simple, you’ll take a snapshot of your instance and follow the step-by-step process in the Lightsail console to export your snapshot to EC2. You can then use the Upgrade to EC2 wizard to get your new EC2 instance up and running.

Access to AWS services

Amazon Lightsail uses a focused set of features like instances, managed databases and load balancers to make it easier to get started. But that doesn't mean you're limited to those options – you can integrate your Lightsail project with some of the 90+ other services in AWS through Amazon VPC peering.

You can manage the services in AWS using the AWS management console, while still keeping your day-to-day management in the Lightsail console. It's the best of both worlds!

Additional Information

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.