Amazon Lightsail features

Lightsail offers virtual servers (instances) that are easy to set up and backed by the power and reliability of AWS. You can launch your website, web application, or project in minutes, and manage your instance from the intuitive Lightsail console or API.

As you’re creating your instance, Lightsail lets 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. Every Lightsail instance comes with a built-in firewall allowing you to allow or restrict traffic to your instances based on source IP, port, and protocol.

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

Lightsail Containers enables 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.

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Lightsail’s simplified load balancing routes web traffic across your instances so your websites and applications can accommodate variations in traffic, protected against outages, and deliver a seamless visitor experience.

Additionally, Lightsail load balancers include integrated certificate management, providing free SSL/TLS certificates you can provision and add to a load balancer in just a few clicks. You can request and manage certificates directly from the Lightsail console – and we manage renewals on your behalf.

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Lightsail offers a fully configured MySQL or PostgreSQL databases plan that includes memory, processing, storage, and transfer allowance. With Lightsail managed databases, you can easily scale your databases independently of your virtual servers, improve application availability, or run standalone databases in the cloud. You can also deploy multi-tiered applications, all within Lightsail, by creating multiple instances connected to a central managed database, and a load balancer that directs traffic to the instances.

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Amazon Lightsail offers both block and object storage. You can scale your storage quickly and easily with highly available SSD-backed storage for your Linux or Windows virtual server. For Lightsail Object Storage, you can easily host static content on the cloud.

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Lightsail enables content delivery network (CDN) distributions, which are built on the same infrastructure as Amazon CloudFront. This allows you to easily distribute your content to a global audience by setting up proxy servers across the world, so that your users across the globe can access your website geographically closer to them, thus reducing latency.

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Lightsail offers virtual servers (instances) that are easy to set up and backed by the power and reliability of AWS. You can launch your website, web application, or project in minutes, and manage your instance from the intuitive Lightsail console or API.

As you’re creating your instance, Lightsail lets 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. Every Lightsail instance comes with 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.

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As your cloud ideas expand, you can 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.

Learn more about upgrading to EC2

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!

Learn more about using Lightsail with other AWS services