Amazon Web Services (EC2 and Lightsail)

Platform

Products

name: Amazon Lightsail virtual private servers; category: virtual_private_server; cpu isolation: shared; description: Simplified burstable Linux/Unix and Windows VPS bundles with fixed RAM, vCPU, SSD storage and data-transfer allowances; optional static IP, DNS, snapshots, databases, load balancers, CDN and container services are managed in the Lightsail console or API., name: EC2 burstable general-purpose instances; category: burstable_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: shared; description: T-family instances earn CPU credits for a documented sustainable baseline and can burst above it. T3 and T4g launch in Unlimited mode by default, so sustained use above baseline can incur surplus-credit charges., name: EC2 general-purpose instances; category: virtual_machine; cpu isolation: multitenant_or_dedicated; description: Balanced M, T, A and Mac families across Intel, AMD and AWS Graviton processors; exact generations, sizes and tenancy options vary by Region and Local Zone., name: EC2 compute-optimized and HPC instances; category: compute_optimized_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: multitenant_or_dedicated; description: C-series and Hpc-series instances for compute-bound, batch, gaming, scientific and tightly coupled high-performance workloads, including eligible EFA networking., name: EC2 memory-optimized instances; category: memory_optimized_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: multitenant_or_dedicated; description: R, X, U and high-memory families for databases, analytics and other memory-intensive workloads., name: EC2 storage-optimized instances; category: storage_optimized_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: multitenant_or_dedicated; description: I, D, H and related families combine compute with high-throughput or low-latency local storage; instance-store data is ephemeral., name: EC2 accelerated-computing instances; category: gpu_and_accelerator_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: multitenant_or_dedicated; description: P, G, F, Inf, Trn and DL families expose supported GPUs, FPGAs or AWS accelerators for AI, inference, training, graphics and specialized compute., name: EC2 Spot Instances; category: interruptible_virtual_machine; cpu isolation: depends_on_instance_type; description: Discounted spare EC2 capacity that AWS can interrupt with a two-minute notice when capacity is reclaimed; suited to fault-tolerant workloads., name: EC2 Dedicated Instances, Dedicated Hosts and bare-metal instances; category: dedicated_or_bare_metal_compute; cpu isolation: dedicated; description: Dedicated Instances run on single-customer hardware, Dedicated Hosts expose host placement and licensing controls, and supported .metal sizes provide direct access to the physical server without a conventional guest hypervisor.

Operating systems

EC2 Amazon-provided, public, shared, private, imported and AWS Marketplace Amazon Machine Images for compatible Linux, Unix-like and Windows operating systems, Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Microsoft Windows Server license-included EC2 images, plus eligible third-party distributions through public or Marketplace AMIs, Lightsail AlmaLinux OS 9, Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux 2023, CentOS Stream, Debian, FreeBSD, openSUSE and Ubuntu blueprints, Lightsail Windows Server 2016, 2019 and 2022 blueprints

Virtualization

AWS Nitro System and Nitro Hypervisor on current Nitro-based EC2 instance types, Xen hypervisor on supported previous-generation EC2 instance types, Lightsail underlying hypervisor is not disclosed in the current first-party product documentation

CPU isolation

T3 and T4g burstable instances expose guest vCPUs but provide a size-specific sustainable baseline through CPU credits; the nano baseline is 5% per vCPU and the medium baseline is 20% per vCPU, non-burstable EC2 instance families provide their configured vCPU capacity without a CPU-credit baseline, while ordinary tenancy remains multitenant, Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts isolate customer workloads onto single-customer hardware, and supported bare-metal sizes expose the physical server, Lightsail instances are burstable and AWS publishes a sustainable and burstable operating model, but it does not publish the exact baseline for the 0.5 GiB benchmark bundle

Features

• App installation services: AWS Marketplace, Amazon Lightsail blueprints; artifacts: EC2 AMIs, containers, Helm charts, SaaS listings, professional services, Lightsail application and development-stack images; capabilities: discover, subscribe to and deploy eligible commercial and free machine images into EC2, launch preconfigured Lightsail applications including WordPress, Drupal, Ghost, Joomla!, Magento, Redmine, LAMP, Nginx and Node.js, install arbitrary software with administrator access inside compatible EC2 or Lightsail guests
  ✓
• Templates & images types: Amazon, public, shared, private, imported and Marketplace AMIs, versioned EC2 launch templates containing AMI, instance, storage, network, security-group, IAM and user-data settings, EBS snapshots and reusable AMIs created from instances, AWS CloudFormation JSON or YAML infrastructure stacks, cloud-init and EC2 user-data initialization, Lightsail OS, application and development-stack blueprints plus instance snapshots; interfaces: AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, EC2 and Lightsail APIs, AWS SDKs, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform AWS provider
  ✓
• Network orchestration interfaces and tooling: AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, service APIs, AWS SDKs, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform AWS provider; services: Amazon VPC IPv4 and IPv6 networks, subnets, route tables, internet and egress-only gateways, NAT gateways and multiple elastic network interfaces, VPC peering, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Site-to-Site VPN, Client VPN and Direct Connect, EC2 Auto Scaling groups with health replacement, scheduled, metric and predictive scaling across eligible Availability Zones, Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS orchestration on EC2 or eligible serverless capacity, Lightsail private networking, static IPs and peering to the account default VPC
  ✓
• Firewall services: name: EC2 security groups; scope: stateful instance or network-interface allow rules for inbound and outbound traffic, name: VPC network ACLs; scope: ordered stateless allow and deny rules applied at subnet level, name: AWS Network Firewall; scope: managed stateful and stateless inspection through VPC firewall endpoints and reusable rule groups, name: Lightsail firewall; scope: instance-level public ingress rules for IPv4 and IPv6 with supported source, protocol and port controls; controls: IPv4 or IPv6 source and destination, protocol, port or port range, referenced security group, stateful or stateless inspection where supported
  ✓
• Load balancer services: Elastic Load Balancing, Lightsail load balancers; types: Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, Gateway Load Balancer, Classic Load Balancer (previous generation), simplified Lightsail HTTP/HTTPS load balancer; capabilities: health-checked distribution to EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses and other supported targets across one or more Availability Zones, Layer 7 host, path, header and query routing on Application Load Balancers, high-throughput Layer 4 TCP, TLS, UDP and TCP_UDP handling with static addresses on Network Load Balancers, GENEVE traffic steering to virtual appliances through Gateway Load Balancers, Lightsail distribution across instances in multiple Availability Zones
  ✓
• DNS management name: Amazon Route 53 and Lightsail DNS; capabilities: public authoritative and VPC private hosted zones, simple, weighted, latency, failover, geolocation, geoproximity, IP-based and multivalue routing policies where supported, endpoint health checks, DNS failover, VPC Resolver, resolver endpoints, DNS Firewall and Traffic Flow, Lightsail DNS zones and records; domain registration: status: offered; service: Amazon Route 53 Domains; capabilities: search and register supported top-level domains, transfer eligible registrations, automatic renewal, privacy protection where supported, automatic hosted-zone creation for new registrations
  ✓
• Git integrations services: AWS CodeConnections, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild; providers: GitHub, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, GitHub Enterprise Server, GitLab.com, GitLab self-managed Community or Enterprise Edition, Bitbucket Cloud, Azure DevOps; capabilities: authenticated source connections for supported build and deployment pipelines, branch, commit and pull-request or merge-request driven automation where supported by the connected service, IAM-controlled use of connections by eligible AWS developer services; limitations: Bitbucket Server is not supported by CodeConnections, GitHub Enterprise Cloud data-residency custom ghe.com domains are not currently supported, supported self-managed versions and regional availability must be checked
  ✓
• Container registry services: Amazon Elastic Container Registry, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Lightsail container services; providers: Amazon ECR private, Amazon ECR Public, Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, GitLab Container Registry SaaS, Kubernetes registry, Quay, Microsoft Azure Container Registry, Chainguard Registry, cross-account or cross-region Amazon ECR; capabilities: store, replicate, scan and control access to Docker and OCI images in private or public ECR repositories, pull-through cache supported upstream registries into private ECR, run images with ECS, EKS or Lightsail container services, push and pull through standard Docker or OCI-compatible client workflows
  ✓