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by cutety 2884 days ago
I recently had to spin up an instance of an app I work on aws, and having never really used aws outside some light s3 usage, lightsail is a god send. At work, everything we have is hosted on our own (on prem ) servers, that are either fire walled off or restricted to company login, hence why I had to spin something up on aws for demos or whatever they want to do with it. And, for my personal/hobby stuff, I just have a swarm cluster setup on DO. And as soon as I went to create an EC2 instance (I think that’s what I was looking for), I realized I had no idea what was going on. Since this was a quick little thing that was going to get almost no real usage, I didn’t want to spend several hours figuring the options and what kind of instance I needed. I just wanted to go back to good ol’ DO where I could have a new droplet spun up in like three clicks.

And then I found lightsail, when I was clicking through the million different services, and I was like holy shit, this is familiar, and in like three clicks later, I had a server running! Obviously, it doesn’t have all the features DO offers (because I imagine those can be done with other AWS services), but I didn’t need them/use them (aside from DO’s DNS). Really, my only gripe I’ve had with it so far is the OS offerings. All my servers (personal & work) are CentOS, so I was slightly annoyed when I found out I could get a CentOS server on lightsail, so I just settled with Ubuntu because that’s fine and I’m familiar enough with it.

So, if you need something hosted on AWS for whatever reason, and are not familiar with it at all, but are with something like DO/Linode, lightsail is something to look into. I think the pricing was fairly comparable to DO, maybe a little more expensive, but I’m not paying for it so I didn’t really look.

Word on the street is we’re gonna start moving a lot of our infra to AWS at work though, so I guess I should probably at least figure out how the hell EC2 works...
1 comments
joaomacp 2884 days ago
EC2 has a lot of options indeed. I just searched YouTube for "EC2 free tier setup" and clicked what the guy clicked (t2.micro, no more than 30GB block storage, and you can get an Elastic IP* for free, as long as you immediately attach it to the instance).

* - when you stop and start an instance, it will change IP address. But if you attach it an Elastic IP, it stays the same.

link