Episode 099 - AWS knocking on Digital Oceans Door with Lightsail

https://amazonlightsail.com/ Virtual private servers made easy. Starting at $5 per month

Starting at $5 512 MB Memory 1 Core Processor 20 GB SSD Disk 1 TB Transfer*

Upto $80 8 GB Memory 2 Core Processor 80 GB SSD Disk 5 TB Transfer*

Included in all plans - Static IP address - SSH terminal access - DNS management - Intuitive management console - SSH key management - Server monitoring - Access to AWS services

But what are the plans? Also referred to as a bundle, a Lightsail plan includes a virtual server with a fixed amount of memory (RAM) and compute (vCPUs), SSD-based storage (disks), and a free data transfer allowance. Lightsail plans also offer static IP addresses (5 per account) and DNS management (3 domain zones per account). Lightsail plans are charged on an hourly, on-demand basis, so you only pay for a plan when you're using it.

Features - VPS ready to deploy in seconds - API - Highly available storage - Speedy & secure networking - Snapshots ($0.05/GB per month) - Access to AWS Services - Basic server or application based setup

The Power of AWS - 99.95% uptime - 38 AWS Availability Zones within 14 Global Regions - Over 70 AWS Services - Benefit from AWS security & compliance standards

Storage and SSD in Amazon Lightsail Every Lightsail server comes with high-performing, persistent SSD-based block storage. You Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability.

Public IP and private IP addresses in Amazon Lightsail A public IP address is the address that is assigned to a Lightsail instance to allow direct access over the Internet. Web servers, email servers, or any server devices that can be accessed directly from the Internet are all candidates for a public IP address. A public IP address is globally unique, and can only be assigned to a unique device.

A private IP address is the address space allocated by InterNIC to allow organizations to create their own private networks.

Amazon Lightsail instance health metrics Lightsail provides several health metrics about your virtual private server (or Lightsail instance) to help you keep your application running smoothly. You can quickly look at CPU utilization, data transfer rates, and status check metrics over a specified time period. You can improve site responsiveness by tweaking certain things, and you can configure alarms so that Lightsail notifies you as events occur.

Instance snapshots in Amazon Lightsail A snapshot is a way to create a backup image of your Lightsail instance (a virtual private server) for reference, if you might need it later. For example, before you delete an instance, you create a snapshot of it so that if you change your mind, you have a backup to help you redo that instance as it was.

How to the instances perform Lightsail instances are specifically engineered by AWS for web servers, developer environments, and small database use cases. Such workloads don't use the full CPU often or consistently, but occasionally need a performance burst. Lightsail uses burstable performance instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the additional ability to burst above the baseline. This design enables you to get the performance you need, when you need it, while protecting you from the variable performance or other common side effects that you might typically experience from over-subscription in other environments.

If you need highly configurable environments and instances with consistently high CPU performance for applications such as video encoding or HPC applications, we recommend you use Amazon EC2.

Upgrading the size? Yes. You can take a snapshot of your instance, and use the API to launch a new, larger size instance. Note that you currently have to use the API, as launching a larger instance than the original is not currently available in the Lightsail console.

What regions is Lightsail available in? Lightsail is currently available in all the Availability Zones in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) region. Instances created in different Availability Zones can communicate between zones privately and for free, and are much less likely to be impaired concurrently.

Free Hours! Whether you're an existing or new AWS customer, you get 750 hours of free usage of the $5 Lightsail plan for free. You can use your 750 hours of usage across as many instances as you like. For example, you can run a single Lightsail instance for a whole month, or 10 Lightsail instances for 75 hours. The free trial offer is only applicable to usage within the first calendar month from when you sign up to use Lightsail.