Day 15 - Lightsail, EFS & FSx

Date: 2025-09-26 (Friday)
Status: “Done”

Lecture Notes

Amazon Lightsail

  • Simplified compute service with predictable monthly pricing (starting ~$3.5/month).
  • Includes bundled data transfer at lower rates than EC2.
  • Ideal for small workloads, development, or testing environments.
  • Supports snapshots for backups.
  • Runs inside a managed VPC and can connect to standard VPCs via one-click peering.

Lightsail Use Cases:

  • Simple web applications
  • WordPress sites
  • Development/test environments
  • Small business applications
  • Learning and experimentation

Lightsail vs EC2:

Feature Lightsail EC2
Pricing Fixed monthly Pay-as-you-go
Complexity Simple Advanced
Scalability Limited Unlimited
Target Small projects Enterprise

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)

  • Fully managed NFSv4 file system mountable by multiple EC2 instances simultaneously.
  • Scales automatically to petabytes.
  • Pay only for the storage used (unlike EBS provisioned size).
  • Can be mounted from on-prem via VPN or Direct Connect.

EFS Features:

  • Concurrent access from multiple instances
  • Automatic scaling
  • Regional service (multi-AZ)
  • Lifecycle management
  • Encryption at rest and in transit

EFS Storage Classes:

  • Standard: Frequently accessed files
  • Infrequent Access (IA): Lower cost for rarely accessed files
  • One Zone: Single AZ for cost savings

Amazon FSx

  • Managed, scalable file systems for Windows, Lustre, and NetApp ONTAP.
  • AWS handles setup, scaling, and backups.
  • Accessible from EC2, on-prem servers, or users via SMB or NFS protocols.

FSx Variants:

FSx for Windows File Server

  • Native Windows file system
  • SMB protocol support
  • Active Directory integration
  • DFS namespaces

FSx for Lustre

  • High-performance computing
  • Machine learning workloads
  • Sub-millisecond latencies
  • S3 integration

FSx for NetApp ONTAP

  • Multi-protocol (NFS, SMB, iSCSI)
  • Data deduplication and compression
  • Snapshots and replication

AWS Application Migration Service (MGN)

  • Used for migrating or replicating physical/virtual servers to AWS for DR or modernization.
  • Continuously replicates source machines to lightweight staging instances on EC2.
  • During cut-over, MGN launches fully functional EC2 instances from the replicated data.

Migration Phases:

  1. Install agent on source servers
  2. Continuous replication to AWS
  3. Testing with non-disruptive test instances
  4. Cutover to production

Exploration

Microsoft Workloads on AWS

  • A curated series covering deployment, optimization, and best practices for running Microsoft workloads on AWS.

Week 3 Summary

  • Bao quát Compute: EC2/instance types, AMI, EBS và Instance Store.
  • Thực hành Auto Scaling và các mô hình giá EC2.
  • Nắm thêm dịch vụ liên quan: Lightsail, EFS, FSx.
  • Labs: (ghi chú lại các lab thực hiện trong tuần này).