What is Amazon Lightsail?
Last updated: March 23, 2018
Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to get started with AWS if you just need virtual private servers. Lightsail includes everything you need to launch your project quickly – a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP – for a low, predictable price. After you create your instance, you can easily connect to it. You can manage your instances using the Lightsail console, Lightsail API, or Lightsail command line interface (CLI).
Who is Lightsail for?
Lightsail is for developers. You can choose an image for your Lightsail instance that jumpstarts your dev 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 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 in Lightsail
Amazon Linux 2017
CentOS 7
Ubuntu Server 16 and 18
Free BSD 10
Debian 8 and 9
openSUSE Leap
Linux
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows
CMS applications in Lightsail
WordPress powered by Bitnami
WordPress Multisite powered by Bitnami
Drupal powered by Bitnami
Joomla powered by Bitnami
Linux
E-commerce and project management applications in Lightsail
Magento powered by Bitnami (eCommerce)
Redmine (Project Management)
Linux
Development stacks in Lightsail
LAMP stack (PHP 5 and PHP 7) powered by Bitnami
Node.js powered by Bitnami
MEAN Stack powered by Bitnami (HVM)
LEMP Stack (Nginx) by Bitnami
GitLab powered by Bitnami (HVM)
Plesk Hosting Stack on Ubuntu
Linux
SQL Server 2016 Express
Windows
Get started now
You can do any of the following to get going: