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Comment by kissgyorgy | Hacker News Reader

As far as I understand, the advantage of Lightsail is that you get access to the rest of the AWS services, NOT it's price or pure simplicity.

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Sort of stupid to price it out there like that then. To me it just seems a cheap way to mess with the lowend market. Try to get some of those people using AWS, so you can hook them into your expensive offerings.

Eh, Lightsail is very stingy compared to competitors in the lowend market, and the CPUs & SSD space don't linearly scale which will deter many who forsee the need to scale their container as their needs grow.

lowendtalk.com can show ya what Lightsail is competing against, IMO more BW, SSD Space and less aggressive throttling are needed if they are to compete with even the higher end of that market, it comes off as a stingier knockoff of Digital Ocean & Linode.

It could alternatively be framed that it benefits users who could learn some AWS through using their low-end stuff. (I guess AWS skills are probably desirable in the job market).

The obvious followup question: is lightsail the same interface / setup as normal AWS so that this would indeed work? or is it some sort of vastly simplified separate thing?

Lightsail does require having an AWS account, and I do believe you still have to go through the same setup (verification, sign up with a credit card). But the interface to create machines is vastly simplified.

You choose either the base OS, or an app stack (like Nodejs, or LAMP), then the price you want to pay, then name the machine.

If the article's evidence is the reality of Lightsail, it's clearly not a production platform. Amazon does state that the intent is really for developers to quickly spin up instances in which to experiment, and being able to use Amazon's unique Linux image that contains the latest AWS hooks makes for a good way to develop apps for later deployment to a fully-enabled AWS instance.

It's $10 a month. They do offer bigger instances. The t2.micro instance this maps to gives you 10% of a CPU and bursts to more. It's not much, but it is predictable and, crucially, not a function of the amount of oversubscription by the vendor or CPU use by your neighbours, both of which are typically unknown variables.

This would be nice, but actually getting those services set up is currently opaque. I have a service request in asking how to actually tie one of these instances to a load balancer and it is just sitting there unanswered.

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