Amazon Lightsail

One of the many benefits to becoming an AWS Community Builder includes receiving promotional AWS Promotional Credits. The advantage to having these credits is the ability to use them to learn more about various AWS Products and Services.

For today’s blog post, I decided that’s it’s time to learn more about Amazon Lightsail. This post will be relatively straight forward and composed at a high-level. Use cases for Amazon Lightsail include launching simple web applications, create custom websites, build small business applications, and the ability to spin up test environments. For this use case, I will create a OS Only instance with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Before you begin, an Amazon account is required. I won’t get into details on how to create an AWS account but I will outline the steps to log into AWS and then create an Amazon Lightsail instance.

• Log into AWS, search for Lightsail in the upper-left corner, and then select Lightsail to proceed.

• Select Let’s Get Started to create and launch your first instance. .

• Next, select your preferred platform (Linux/Unix or Microsoft Windows). For the purpose of this post, I selected Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and defaulted to the AWS Region and Availability Zone provided. You then have the option to add a launch script and assign or create an SSH key pair, but I decided to proceed and accept the defaults. The next step requires you to select an Instance Plan and I defaulted to the $3.5/month plan which includes the first three months free (Amazon Lightsail Pricing info can be found here). Keep in mind, you do have the option to toggle between the various options (price per month, memory, processing, storage, and transfer) to view the differences. Finally, you provide your instance a unique name and how many instances you’re interested in. For this purpose, I named it AlRasheed-Ubuntu and selected one instance. I did not select any Key-Only or Key-Value tags and then clicked on Create Instance to complete the process.

• Within a few moments, my instance has been created. From start to finish, it took less than five minutes.

This concludes this post and I hope you found it useful. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.