Drupal As A Service on Amazon Lightsail

Why Amazon Lightsail?

Amazon Lightsail is one of the simplest and easiest ways to get started with Amazon Web Services. It is designed to suit the needs of developers, small businesses and students omitting the need to launch and manage servers. Amazon Lightsail can be leveraged to build simple web applications, websites, business software and serve as development or test environments.

Why Lightsail over Amazon EC2

While Amazon EC2 might offer more stability and flexibility in terms of infrastructure, Lightsail is a more attractive option to develop, deploy and manage basic websites and applications. The most prevalent benefits are relatively fewer configurations and automatic security updates to track security threats and vulnerabilities as compared to Amazon EC2.

Let’s take a look at why Lightsail can be preferred over EC2:

• Amazon has cut Lightsail prices in half for quite a few of their Linux offerings. Lightsail offers SSD and high-speed data transfer for its entry-level plan of $3.50 per month. EC2 has a per-hour pricing model and comes to approximately $5 per month without SSD storage.
• Lightsail comes with a load balancer service that improves performance and traffic management across multiple Lightsail instances to handle heavy workloads.
• You can start with Lightsail and upgrade to EC2 in the future. The Upgrade to EC2 feature allows you to create a copy of your Lightsail instance in Amazon EC2.

Installing Drupal on Lightsail

We will take a look at how to set up a new Lightsail service, create a Drupal instance and a static IP. We’ll also take a look at adding modules and playing around with the database.

1. Step 1: Sign in using your AWS account

Sign in to an existing AWS account or create one from the Amazon Lightsail login page.

2. Create an instance

Once you sign in to Lightsail, the next step is to create a new virtual private server, also referred to as creating a new instance. Amazon Lightsail offers a plethora of options from which you can choose. You need to select the latest Drupal version from here.

3. Select your pricing plan

Once you select Drupal, the next step is to select your plan based on the amount of Memory, Processor, Storage and Bandwidth that you need.

4. Select your server region

Once you’ve decided your pricing plan, you now need to select the region where your server will be located. You need to keep in mind, the further your server from your business location, the higher the data latency will be.

5. Select the add-ons

Amazon Lightsail offers amazing support in terms of how your website or application can scale to handle heavy workloads. You can choose to opt for add-ons such as blockstorage, load balancers and so on. We would suggest you keep it simple in the beginning and buy these add-ons once you understand your business needs on the cloud.

6. Naming your instance

Give your instance a name and click on Create. Within a few seconds, you will have your Amazon Lightsail with Drupal up and running.

7. Managing your instance

To manage your Drupal instance on Lightsail, you need to click on the three dots (more options). This will allow you to access the Lightsail administration console. This dashboard gives you all the information (Metrics,Networking, History and so on) you need. Additionally, you can also use the CLI or APIs to create and manage instances.

To use the web-based SSH shell access that Amazon Lightsail offers out of the box. Click on the ‘Connect using SSH’ orange button and you’re ready to go.

Key Takeaways

Lightsail is designed for businesses to help them start small and scale as they grow.

It offers developers support for all their compute, storage and networking capacity and capability needs. With the ability to set up Drupal as a 1-click service makes Drupal on Lightsail very easy to use. It requires minimal management responsibilities from you.

It's ideal for simpler workloads and quick deployments and cost-effective with plans starting at $3.50 per month.

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