#C09 Lightsail Summary.

This section summarises the five Amazon Lightsail-related articles I have written over the past five issues.

Here is a bulleted list of the work we did this time. The article is long and complex in text, but the actual work is concise and not very difficult.

Register with AWS and set up an executing user.

Once you have registered with AWS and created an executable user, login with the executable user and install Lightsail and Drupal. The installation is very simple: select the region you want to install in, select the package, select the Lightsail plan, and then install, which takes a few minutes and creates a Drupal instance in the Lightsail console.

Once the Drupal instance is ready, change the IP address to a static address and assign the domain, using the DNS on board the Drupal instance, checking the AWS nameservers that are set by default and writing the primary domain and subdomain in the DNS in the A record to complete the domain assignment.

Issue a private key to enable SSH access to the Drupal instance, confirm the SSH connection, and once connected, obtain the root password to configure the initial settings for the Drupal admin console and complete the initial Drupal configuration.

Since you will be configuring SSL settings, connect to the Drupal instance via SSH, complete the SSL settings in the msert specified by Bitnami, and the installed Drupal website is ready to be published.

Issue email accounts with the domain you have acquired. Amazon Work Mail is a service similar to Google Workspace's Gmail, where you set up an organisation to manage your domain, and then register users within the organisation to issue email accounts.
To enable the use of email accounts on the acquired domain, after registering the organisation, assign the domain to the organisation and write email-related records such as MX records and CNAMEs in the DNS. Once you have completed the configuration, you can register as a user and issue email accounts. By default, an email client that can be used on the web is issued, but since everything is in English, configure your email client so that you can use email on your Mac or iPhone.

Now that the email address of the domain you have acquired is available, configure the contact form - we will use the Drupal default contact form, so configure the necessary settings. Since we are setting up an email form, we will install a reCAPTCHA for security reasons.

In my mistake, I registered the initial settings with a personal address before acquiring the domain, and after acquiring the domain, I set the email account of the domain I acquired as the recipient of the contact form, which resulted in an error where the contact form email could not be received.

If you change the registered email of the user account you are using to the email of the domain you acquired and set the recipient of the contact form to the email of the same domain, it will work without problems, so if you do this, the contact form setup is complete.

I made an error and took another option, so I installed SMTP Authentication Support, a module that enables Drupal to use external SMTP, configured SMTP authentication with Amazon Simple Email Service and set up the contact SES is used to send and receive forms. It is a form like the merit of the injury which was set up by the detour of the error, and it is an over-spec system in my WEB site, but it is an environment which can use the system of the email with high specs, so I will use this form for a while.

In the above form, I used AWS, installed Drupal on Lightsail, completed the necessary settings and the website was published. What I didn't expect was that I made an error in the contact form and had to use an external SMTP, but thanks to that mistake, I started using SES, which I personally didn't feel the need to do, and this has made me realise the high availability of the AWS system.

AWS has an image of being a large-scale cloud system used by professionals, and I myself thought it was not for personal use, but by actually using it, I found that personal use was no problem and that it was an excellent system that was very easy to use. There are some problems in understanding the system and how to deal with the English manuals, but even a beginner like myself can understand and actually use the system with a little patience. The price is not easy to understand, which is a concern from an external point of view, but when I actually use the system, I realise that it is certainly different from the price structure of Japanese hosting companies, but it is not difficult to understand.

The fact that the unit of measure is set in hours makes it difficult to predict the approximate monthly cost, but when you understand that the high availability of AWS is related to the flexibility to scale by the hour and the ability to seamlessly expand and contract without system shutdowns, you can understand that the fee structure makes sense and that the system is flexible. system.

I have only just started using AWS, so I am still inexperienced in terms of its original functions and how to use it for its intended purpose, but I have found it to be a wide-open and tolerant system that even a novice like me can use.