Core AWS Services

Compute

• EC2 — virtual machines; choose instance type (t3.micro, c6i.large, etc.), AMI, VPC, security groups

• ECS / EKS — container orchestration; ECS is AWS-native, EKS is managed Kubernetes

• Lambda — serverless functions; event-driven, pay per invocation, 15-min max duration

• Fargate — serverless containers (no EC2 to manage); works with ECS and EKS

• Auto Scaling — automatically scale EC2 instances based on metrics (CPU, custom CloudWatch)

Storage

• S3 — object storage; buckets, objects, versioning, lifecycle policies, 11 nines durability

• EBS — block storage for EC2 (like a hard drive); SSD (gp3) or HDD; AZ-specific

• EFS — managed NFS; shared across multiple EC2 instances, auto-scaling

• CloudFront — CDN; edge caching for S3, EC2, APIs; 450+ edge locations

Databases

• RDS — managed relational DB: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server

• Aurora — AWS-built MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible; faster, auto-scaling storage, serverless option

• DynamoDB — managed NoSQL key-value + document store; single-digit ms latency at any scale

• ElastiCache — managed Redis or Memcached

Networking

• VPC — Virtual Private Cloud; isolated network with subnets, route tables, internet gateways

• Route 53 — DNS + health checking + routing policies (latency, geo, failover, weighted)

• ALB — Application Load Balancer; HTTP/HTTPS, path/host routing, WebSocket, sticky sessions

• API Gateway — managed API front-end; REST/HTTP/WebSocket APIs, auth, throttling, caching

Messaging & Events

• SQS — managed message queue; standard (at-least-once) or FIFO (exactly-once, ordered)

• SNS — pub/sub; fan-out to multiple SQS, Lambda, HTTP, email, SMS endpoints

• EventBridge — serverless event bus; route events between AWS services, SaaS, custom apps

Security & Identity

• IAM — users, groups, roles, policies (JSON); principle of least privilege

• Secrets Manager — store, rotate, and retrieve secrets (DB passwords, API keys)

• Cognito — managed user auth (user pools) + identity federation (identity pools)

• ACM — free SSL/TLS certificates for CloudFront, ALB, API Gateway