What is on AWS Lightsail's roadmap?

Hi, Thank you for your interest in Amazon Lightsail and for using Lightsail Containers. We are actively invested in improving and building new features for Lightsail Containers (and Lightsail in general). Support for Apex domains, Health check improvements, Logging improvements are some are the recent things we released on Lightsail Containers. More features and improvements are planned for the upcoming months around interoperability with other AWS/Lightsail services, user experience etc. We would be very interested in hearing your feedback and learning the rough edges you are facing with Lightsail Containers. Thank you!

We would be very interested in hearing your feedback and learning the rough edges you are facing with Lightsail Containers. Thank you!

Thanks for taking an interest.

Logging improvements are some are the recent things we released

I must have not noticed this improvement – there is no announcement about it on the what's new page either. Nevertheless, logging is my biggest complaint with Lightsail containers at the moment. The console UI for tracking logs is simply not at the level that can be used seriously.

1. tailing logs is missing and requires constant refreshing
2. date and time for log entries is in UTC time but the timeframe picker is in viewer's local time
3. forwarding and centralising logs for Lightsail Containers is very difficult. The only way I was able to achieve an okayish workaround is to embed Filebeat in every image in order to send logs to somewhere better suited for viewing logs – i.e logz.io
4. having to include Filebeat in every image is cumbersome and unnecessarily increases the size of images. Something like Heroku's log drain or DigitalOcean's App Platform log forwarding is needed
5. it's not possible to capture container deployment logs and forward them to something like logz.io

A container can run 10 images and it seems Lightsail does not force all 10 to be the same image. This means my container can run 1 nginx load balancer image, 5 Rails images, 1 Postgres database image and 1 Redis and 1 Meilisearch image. However to deploy a new version of my Rails app I have to deploy Postgres, Redis and Meilisearch too. Why not allow deploying them individually? At the moment if a deploy does not specify the DB, Redis and search images, Lightsail will turn off any running instances of those images. That seems odd to me.

Finally, the documentation for this product is light and scarce. When I think about how Lightsail can run 10 images/services per container, it makes me wonder why the team isn't blogging about various use cases that can benefit from this and describe techniques that would help folks like me not have to invent the wheel through trial and error. This is a huge opportunity to attract devs who want to try an idea on the cheap and then transition to EC2 or ECS when they outgrow Lightsail.

Anyway. It's assuring to see two responses to my original question. I look forward to your response and future announcements.

Hello! AWS typically announces new features to services very close to their release date or just after. It's uncommon to publish a future roadmap.

If you would like to follow updates for a particular services, you can visit the AWS What's New page https://aws.amazon.com/new/ and choose "Filter by Product or Service>Compute>Amazon Lightsail".

For example, less than two months ago Lightsail introduced AWS Cloudformation support https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/amazon-lightsail-support-aws-cloudformation-instances-disks-databases/