What is Amazon Lightsail?

Amazon Lightsail is a cloud service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that bundles cloud compute power and memory for new or less experienced cloud users.

AWS packages memory, processing, storage and transfer into virtual machines (VMs) for customers to purchase, then releases that compute capacity as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. Amazon Lightsail derives its compute power from an EC2 instance. Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides secure, configurable compute capacity in the cloud.

AWS designed the Lightsail service to make it simple to understand and purchase. The vendor manages the infrastructure, which shares the same uptime and global regions and availability zones as EC2.

Amazon Lightsail launches virtual private servers (VPS), which are VMs with individual operating systems but have restricted access to physical server resources. Customers can choose from multiple Lightsail plans with the following characteristics:

memory ranging from 512 MB to 32 GB;
processors with one to eight cores;
a solid-state drive with 20 GB to 640 GB of storage;
data transfer allowances of 1 TB to 7 TB; and
pricing from $3.50 to $240 per month.

All plans include a static IP address, intuitive management console, secure shell terminal access, remote desktop access, domain name server management and server monitoring. Customers also have access to AWS tools.

Lightsail offers a variety of operating systems, applications and stacks so a customer can build a template. A developer uses the Lightsail command-line interface (CLI) as an alternative to the console. Lightsail also provides a reference for application programming interfaces (API) and documentation.

Amazon load balancer delivering WordPress site media content
Use Amazon LightSail’s applications and configurations to build projects like a basic e-commerce application, website or blog — for example, a WordPress blog.