Amazon LightSail — Virtual Cloud Server
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Introduction
Amazon Lightsail, launched in 2016 is essentially a virtual private server (VPS) that offers you everything needed to deploy an application or website, in a cost effective and easy-to-understand manner. It is a basic service but extremely convenient.
It is designed for customers, developers, small business or startups to get quickly started in the AWS as it reduces the learning curve in the beginning, and user can later adopt the broad AWS Services as they get more familiar with the AWS cloud and/or solution workload increases.
Under the hood, Lightsail is powered by Amazon EC2, Application Load Balancer (ALB), and other AWS services and by doing this it offers the level of security, reliability, and scalability you are expecting from AWS.
It also works great with container workloads. You can deploy your container images to the cloud with the same simplicity and the same bundled pricing Amazon Lightsail provides for your virtual servers.
In this post, we will cover the following topics:
- Virtual Private Server Basics
- Getting Started with LightSail
- LightSail Container Service
Virtual Private Server Basics
Amazon Lightsail is a powerful virtual private server (VPS) built for reliability and performance.
AWS Lightsail is Amazon’s answer to the rise of Digital Ocean, OVH, Linode LLC, and other affordable VPS players in a very lucrative VPS market. Lightsail started as a pretty basic service, but over the years, AWS added features like block storage, Windows support, databases, and containers. Given the history, you can expect some more additions by the time you read this post.
A virtual private server (VPS) is a hosting solution relying on virtualization technology to provide dedicated resources on a server with various users.
A VPS divides real dedicated servers into numerous virtual machines or servers, each with its own hardware, operating system, and applications. VPS hosting is a shared hosting service in which each client has their own virtual machine,” but they function and store data in complete isolation.
