On november 2016, Amazon launched Lightsail, a new product that is based on his previous and already known services, but with one big feature: simplicity, at fixed prices.
Lightsail offers several instance images with applications pre-installed and ready to be run, for a fixed monthly price, and without the need of understand anything about EC2 configurations, VPCs, security groups, storage, etc. This service is similar to (and is going to compete with) Digital Ocean apps.
If you want to launch a CMS on Lightsail, you have (at the time this post was written) the most popular choices: WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal.
For example, our blog was launched in less than an hour using a WordPress instance, that was ready to be customized and published.
A LAMP (or LEMP) stack is also a nice option to have, but for this one you have plenty of hosting sites that offer the same, and if you are short of budget, you will definitely find lower prices elsewhere.
But the two instance types that most called my attention are Redmine and GitLab. This is an excellent start to have your own company’s set of tools on the cloud, in this case for Project Management (Redmine), and a code repository (GitLab). Of course this are just two, but wouldn’t be nice to have issue trackers, CI tools, wikis, monitoring tools, etc. under one hood? (actually that is what Digital Ocean offers).
Of course Lightsail also offers “OS Only” instances, but I think that if you want to setup your own software there, you have better and more flexible choices from the EC2/EBS/ECS consoles.
Anyway, for us that we have been using AWS for most of our customer’s platforms for a while now, it is nice to have the chance to quickly add pre-installed apps to power-up existing services, for a fixed price.
We are BigCheese, an engineering in-house team.