The king of e-Commerce and cloud computing services, Amazon announced Lightsail at the AWS re: Invent conference. Lightsail is a simple tool offering a breezy server management capability and massive data transfer capabilities. Developers can set up their virtual private servers, integrated with AWS.
Amazon Lightsail Features
The service is targeted to provide storage, computing and networking capabilities to developers and let them manage their work in the cloud. Lightsail is going to be a direct competitor to services like DigitalOcean with the basic variant starting from just $5 a month.
According to the AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, it has been designed keeping in mind the customers who don’t want to get into the nitty- gritty details of the underlying services. Developers are good to go with just a couple of steps – choose the operating system, storage, memory, etc and finalize a name to run your own VPS. Since Lightsail focuses on keeping it really simple by taking care of all simplifying complexities for end users, it is beneficial for the less technical users.
With this move, Amazon is concentrating on improving a vulnerable side of their business. It will cater to developers who are looking for low-cost offerings. Moreover, it is a fast and simple application which can launch a virtual private service with ease.
Lightsail AWS Integration
Since Lightsail is integrated with AWS, it will have all the features a VPS requires – power, reliability, and security. If the requirements increase, developers can also connect to the most advanced services like additional AWS database, messaging and others.
Lightsail includes all the essential components to get a head start on a project – DNS management, virtual machine, SSH connectivity SSD-based storage, data transfer and a static IP at affordable monthly prices. Amazon claims that developers can launch their own virtual private servers with just a few clicks.
Developers can choose their operating system – Ubuntu, Linux, etc, stacks or application like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal among many others.
Then, server size needs to be selected. Lightsail comes in 5 size variations – 20 GB, 30 GB, 40 GB, 60 GB and 80 GB SSD disk. Once this is done, Lightsail will automatically launch the VPS, attach the selected storage, manage IAM, and create a security group, virtual private cloud, setup the DNS and IP addresses.
Other features include:
- Server monitoring
- Management console
- SSH terminal access
- DNS management
- SSH key management
A lot of new features have also been added to AWS to make it more appealing. Athena, an analytic service that allows customers to pay for queries that are run. Artificial intelligence services like Lex, Polly and Recognition to build conversational interfaces, convert text to speech and perform machine learning, especially deep learning based image analysis. AWS Snowmobile is another service, which can move enormous data to the cloud.
Users can try Lightsail free for a month and you can sign in to your AWS account to try Lightsail or create a new account. AWS accounts also include 12 months of free tier access and use of Amazon EC2, S3, and Dynamo DB.
