Ask HN: DIY Virtual Private Server with AWS

Hiya! I am relatively new to devops thing (I only have experience with Ansible & VPSes such as DO/Linode). I was playing with AWS and was wondering what it would take to "recreate" virtual private servers with Amazon products. I realize AWS has Lightstail offering, but I am interested what goes under the hood of such service. I would need an EC2 as a server, Route53 for DNS(?). Anything else I'm missing?