Fargate wanted $35. Lightsail wanted $7.


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Reading time: 15 minutes
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Main Learning: A public container on AWS for $7 a month, with no VPC to own.
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Sponsored by AWS. What we built, what it cost and what we think of it are our own.

Hey Reader 👋đŸŊ

Your first container on ECS comes with homework: a VPC, subnets in two Availability Zones, a load balancer, security groups, a certificate and a task role. Express Mode creates most of it for you now (App Runner's successor, so ECS abstraction number three), but it all lands in your account, and you have to understand it the day something breaks.

Lightsail skips the homework. You hand it an image and get an HTTPS endpoint. We put a public tool on it for $7 a month, and the diagram below shows everything we didn't have to build.

In this issue: why we picked Lightsail over Lambda and Fargate, and three AWS launches from the last two weeks.

Sponsored by AWS

Start on Lightsail with Free Tier credits

New AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credits, and Lightsail runs on them. The account sign-up is shorter than it used to be, and a container service starts at $7 a month.

Explore Amazon Lightsail →
Lightsail: run a public container on AWS for $7 a month

📚 This Week's Deep Dive

The same container on ECS with Fargate and on Lightsail, side by side:

ECS on Fargate needs a VPC, subnets, load balancer, certificate, security groups and a task role, while a Lightsail container service only needs your image

We run the AWS Event Inspector on it, a free public tool for SNS and EventBridge payloads. One Nano node, $7 a month. On ECS with Fargate it'd be $35 or more.

Why not Lambda? And how does it read from S3 without access keys? The article covers both.

📰 This Week in AWS

🔀ECS Gateway: managed ingress for ECS services

ECS now sets up the ALB, the certificate and a DNS name for your services. One ALB covers up to 25 of them. The gateway is free, the ALBs aren't. Read More →

â†Šī¸CloudFormation can force a stuck rollback

Stack stuck in UPDATE_ROLLBACK_FAILED? There's now a force option that finishes the rollback in one call and tells you what's left to clean up. Read More →

💾RDS bills each snapshot on its own

Snapshot costs no longer hide under the instance. Each snapshot gets its own line in Cost Explorer, and you can tag them. Read More →

A Lightsail container service won't replace your EKS cluster. For the small thing that just has to be online, it's a good place to start, and the image moves to ECS without a rebuild when you outgrow it.

Running something on Lightsail already? Hit reply and tell me what it is.

See you next week! 🙏

Tobi & Sandro

​Sandro Volpicella & Tobias Schmidt from AWS Fundamentals​
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Cloud Engineers â€ĸ Fullstack Developers â€ĸ Educators

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