Amazon Lightsail lets you launch Virtual Private Servers on AWS with just a few clicks. With prices starting at $5 per month, Lightsail takes care of the heavy lifting and gives you a simple way to build and host applications. As I showed you in my re:Invent post (Amazon Lightsail – The Power of AWS, the Simplicity of a VPS), you can choose a configuration from a menu and launch a virtual machine preconfigured with SSD-based storage, DNS management, and a static IP address.

Since we launched in November, many customers have used Lightsail to launch Virtual Private Servers. For example, Monash University is using Amazon Lightsail to rapidly re-platform a number of CMS services in a simple and cost-effective manner. They have already migrated 50 workloads and are now thinking of creating an internal CMS service based on Lightsail to allow staff and students to create their own CMS instances in a self-service manner.

Today we are expanding Lightsail into nine more AWS Regions and launching a new, global console.

New Regions

At re:Invent we made Lightsail available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. Earlier this month we added support for several additional Regions in the US and Europe. Today we are launching Lightsail in four of our Asia Pacific Regions, bringing the total to ten. Here’s the full list:

US East (N. Virginia)

US West (Oregon)

US East (Ohio)

Europe (London)

Europe (Frankfurt)

Europe (Ireland)

Asia Pacific (Mumbai)

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

Asia Pacific (Sydney)

Global Console

The updated Lightsail console makes it easy for you to create and manage resources in one or more Regions. I simply choose the desired Region when I create a new instance:

I can see all of my instances and static IP addresses on the same page, no matter what Region they are in:

And I can perform searches that span all of my resources and Regions. All of my LAMP stacks:

Or all of my resources in the Europe (Ireland) Region:

I can perform a similar search on the Snapshots tab:

A new DNS zones tab lets me see my existing zones and create new ones:

Creation of SSH keypairs is now specific to a Region:

I can manage my key pairs on a Region-by-Region basis:

Static IP addresses are also specific to a particular Region:

Available Now

You can use the new Lightsail console and create resources in all ten Regions today!

— Jeff;