I haven't spun up anything in the cloud in a while. I used to dabble in both AWS and Digital Ocean. Usually went with DO because it seemed simpler and my projects were super small (and they had a lot of relevant guides to spinning up X, Y, and Z service on their systems). What is the difference between EC2-classic and whatever is available today? Are you still able to just get a linux box with a public IP address?
Yes, but the reality is that EC2 is optimized for a target audience who wants to customize the deployment beyond a linux box with a public IP.
But iirc following the "Launch Instance" wizard and choosing defaults for everything, as well as a (default) public subnet gives the exact thing you're asking for.
And I think that's been around for at least 8 years - I remember looking at it in 2015 - or maybe 2016(?). Was working with a small startup that needed a small bit of hosting, and they were trying to do it all at AWS because... name cachet. They were getting lost in trying to cobble together lambda, s3 and some other stuff to basically host some JS and images. I suggested Linode (had a working example) but "that's not enterprise" (this was a small pre-revenue startup testing ideas). I then suggested (and setup) a lightsail instance for $5/month doing what was needed, and it too was rebuffed as not enterprise(y) enough. Even being 'at AWS' wasn't enough to start with - they wanted to hit the ground running with lambdas, microservices, multi-region load balancing and complex IAM stuff.
Stated justification was "If we don't bake this in now, it'll be harder to do later", but it was mostly a couple fokls in charge wanted to learn new stuff (someone said that out loud later, confirming my concerns about resume-driven-development).
EDIT: FWIW, my couple small experiences with lightsail itself were fine. Seems like a decent onramp to ease in to the AWS ecosystem, if that's on your roadmap.
Oh man, I don't know any of these concepts (rather I've heard of all of them, but don't know how they apply in practice). I'm probably not the target customer for AWS any more haha. Been so long since I did anything web related. Time to find some networking for dummies youtube channels I guess.
