What is Amazon Lightsail? - Amazon Lightsail

What is Amazon Lightsail?

Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to get started with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for anyone who needs to build websites or web applications. It includes everything you need to launch your project quickly - instances (virtual private servers), container services, managed databases, content delivery network (CDN) distributions, load balancers, SSD-based block storage, static IP addresses, DNS management of registered domains, and resource snapshots (backups) - for a low, predictable monthly price.

Lightsail also offers Amazon Lightsail for Research. With Lightsail for Research, academics and researchers can create powerful virtual computers in the AWS Cloud. These virtual computers come with pre-installed research applications, such as RStudio and Scilab. For more information see the Amazon Lightsail for Research User Guide.

Following are some common actions to take in Lightsail:

Who is Lightsail for?

Lightsail is for everyone. You can choose an image for your Lightsail instance that jump starts your project so you don't have to spend as much time installing software or frameworks.

If you're an individual developer or hobbyist working on a personal project, Lightsail can help you deploy and manage basic cloud resources. You might also be interested in learning or experimenting with cloud services, such as virtual machines, domains or networking. Lightsail provides a quick way to get started.

Lightsail has images with base operating systems, development stacks like LAMP, LEMP (Nginx), and SQL Server Express, and applications like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento. For more detailed information about the software installed on each image, see Choose a Lightsail instance image.

As your project grows, you can add block storage disks and attach them to your Lightsail instance. You can take snapshots of these instances and disks and easily create new instances from those snapshots. You can also peer your VPC so that your Lightsail instances can use other AWS resources outside of Lightsail.

You can also create a Lightsail load balancer and attach target instances to create a highly available application. You can also configure your load balancer to handle encrypted (HTTPS) traffic, session persistence, health checking, and more.

Operating systems

The following operating systems are available in Lightsail.

Linux
  • Amazon Linux 2023

  • Amazon Linux 2

  • CentOS 7 and CS9

  • Ubuntu 22, 20 and 18

  • Free BSD 12.4

  • Debian 10 and 11

  • openSUSE Leap

Windows
  • Windows Server 2022

  • Windows Server 2019

  • Windows Server 2016

  • Windows Server 2012 R2

CMS applications

The following CMS applications are available in Lightsail.

Linux
  • WordPress Certified by Bitnami and Automattic

  • WordPress Multisite Certified by Bitnami and Automattic

  • cPanel & WHM for AlmaLinux (Bring Your Own License)

  • PrestaShop

  • Drupal Packaged by Bitnami

  • Ghost Packaged by Bitnami

  • Joomla Packaged by Bitnami

  • Plesk Hosting Stack on Ubuntu

E-commerce and project management applications

The following e-commerce and project management applications are available in Lightsail.

Linux
  • Magento Packaged by Bitnami (eCommerce)

  • Redmine Packaged by Bitnami (Project Management)

Development stacks

The following development stacks are available in Lightsail.

Linux
  • LAMP stack (PHP 8) Packaged by Bitnami

  • Node.js Packaged by Bitnami

  • MEAN Packaged by Bitnami (HVM)

  • Nginx Packaged by Bitnami (LEMP Stack)

  • Django Packaged by Bitnami

  • GitLab CE Packaged by Bitnami

Windows
  • SQL Server 2022 Express

  • SQL Server 2019 Express

  • SQL Server 2016 Express