We are big fans of the Amazon Web Services army of tools. Thus, we plan on digging deeper into the various services and will keep you informed of our journey. In this article, we will look at Amazon Lightsail. It is a service in their “Compute” group. It is not free, but instead, has a set monthly cost that is perfect for gauging your development overhead.
What Does Lightsail Provide?
The Lightsail service, at a high level, is a quick start for EC2 instances. Lightsail allows the user to set a monthly subscription/cost based on instance size. The server includes storage and IP allocation. Our Launch Your Internet Business walks people through this process via the typical steps. We have found that while Lightsail provides any easy to budget set cost, it also saves around fifteen to thirty minutes of setup time.
The instances it provides by default can include popular software like WordPress, Magento, LAMP stacks and others. There is also an ability to run a script on the server on launch. When you need a test VM configured yesterday or need to provide VMs to your developers, this can be invaluable. It is a step in making AWS your infrastructure provider even for small shops.
At What Cost?
Lightsail is not technically a free tier service. It does provide the lowest end instance (512MB, one processor) free for thirty days. The service is overall competitively priced with similarly configured EC2 instances. The larger value though is an easy way to spin up development instances quickly. Quick access to a server is where virtual machines are at their best. The installation and configuration headaches involved in creating a development environment can be avoided through automation and using the default offerings. When you consider the cost of a developer on an hourly basis, this service pays for itself in the first day.
We use regular and reserved instances of EC2 currently. However, we will be looking for excuses to embrace Lightsail in the future. What experiences have you had with this service? Are there other uses for Lightsail outside of developer instances? Also, if you wonder about how useful these developer images can be, try out Cloud 9. This cloud-based service includes dev instances as part of its cloud development approach.
Check It Out: https://amazonlightsail.com/
