Sailing Smoothly into Scalable and Highly Available Cloud Service

LightSail is the simplest platform for launching and managing virtual private servers (VPS). It’s designed for developers, students and small businesses. It’s ideal for beginners and those who are starting to get into the AWS services. Much simpler than EC2.

Lightsal offers:

• Preconfigured VPS instances: you can launch a Linux instance or server with Wordpress in just few clicks.

• Managed databases: Lightsail offers MySQL and PostgreSQL databases that are easy to scale and maintain

• Containers: Run containerized apps without needing Kubernets or ECS

The catch of our eyes is the price, everything for a fixed price with no big bill’s surprises.

As easily as launch an instance it’s also easy to delete the instances.

Highlights:

-> Snapshots are the backups of your instance

-> Remember to check the location of your instance. It worth all instance running in the same place? (physical redundancy)

-> Why is it so important more than one instance of my instance?

Providing two instances is highly important when you are chasing high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. :

1 – Redudancy and Uptme: If one instance fails (due to hardware failure, software crashes or updates), the second instance can keep your application running. That’s crucial for websites or services that need to be online 24/7

2 – Load Balance: with two instances, you can use a LightSail LoadBalancer to distribute incoming traffic between them. This prevents one server from getting overwhelmed and improves performance during traffic spikes. When is LoadBalance important? Black Friday  for ecommerce websites? And for fintech? Or the companies which hold the stocks?

3 – Deployments: It’s important if would be necessary to turn one instance off, for questions of new features to test or patches. If you need to do it and you have just one instance, you application will be down.

4 – Separations Concerns: In technology I love the way we have the same situation for coding design and also for a wider context, like architecture. In coding it’s super important to keep the concerns separated. In Architecture not? It could be interesting to keep your frontend separate from your backend in terms of security and organization. Keep that in mind.

5 – Scabaility: provide you the option of getting bigger gradually to scale horizontally, as soon as you have more users or more  tasks.

Good to remember:

Lightsail provide you as a default dynamic IP, if your instance restart for some reason, your IP is gonna change. So is possible to set a static IP (check the prices!!).

Load Balance: Alarms of healthy instances, if something is wrong with your instance, you can get a notification, from you or who is responsible for the availability of the instances.

Stogare options: buckt and disk

Good scenario of study: 1 – Create one instance

2 – Create the second instance from the snap shot from the first instance

3 – create a load balance to it

4 – create a .txt with “ubuntu server 1” in the first instance

5 – create a .txt with “ubuntu server 2” in the second instance.

6 – Access the server and see which one it captures

5 – Turn off the first (or the second) instance and test if you access to your txt is still running!

6 – Turn the first (or the second) instance on.

7 – Select an Alarm if just one instance is running for seconds minutes to send a notification.

8 – Turn off the first (or the second) instance

9 – Check you receive the notification!

->  Super important note: after all tests and ‘tasting’, please, make sure you don’t have anything else  running, otherwise you have to pay!

-> Reference: all this knowledge came from www.alura.com.br of lighsail’s course