The rest of our documentation covers individual features - how to create a VM, how a VPC works, how volumes are snapshotted. Reference architectures put those pieces together into a complete, working deployment, and explain the decisions behind it: which offering to pick, which way to publish a server to the internet, which ports to open and why.
Every architecture is documented four ways - a portal walkthrough, the equivalent CloudMonkey commands, an Ansible playbook and a Terraform configuration - so you can start by clicking through it once and end up deploying it repeatably from code.
Available architectures
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RA-01. Basic VM - single cPanel server
The simplest deployment: one VM on an isolated network with a dedicated public IP, published by static NAT with a firewall rule set for web, mail and control panel traffic. The example workload is cPanel/WHM on AlmaLinux 9, but the pattern suits any single-server workload.
How to use these
Each architecture follows the same structure:
- Architecture - a diagram of what you end up with, and how traffic flows through it.
- Resource plan - every zone, offering, template and disk size in one table, so you can price it and check it against your account's resource limits before you start.
- Design decisions - the choices that aren't obvious, with the reasoning and the trade-offs, so you can deviate deliberately rather than by accident.
- Portal walkthrough - the click-by-click build, in order.
- Automation - CloudMonkey, Ansible and Terraform equivalents of the same build.
- Verify - checks to confirm the deployment actually works before you put load on it.
- Day 2 - what to snapshot, how to scale it, and what not to change.
Names, CIDRs and admin IP ranges in the examples are placeholders - substitute your own. Everything else (zone names, network offerings, compute offerings, template names) is real and can be used as-is on Lightspeed Cloud.
Before you start
The automation examples authenticate with an API key and secret key rather than your portal password - see API access for how to generate a pair. For diagramming your own variation of an architecture, the design aides include the same icon set used in the diagrams on these pages.