After this lesson, you will be able to: Recognise the core AWS services (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM, VPC, CloudFront, Route 53) and know what each is for.
AWS has 200+ services; you'll use about 10 daily. This lesson maps the catalog so you know what to reach for.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): virtual machines. The original AWS service. You pick OS + size; you manage everything. Lambda: serverless functions. Triggers (HTTP, queue, schedule); pay per invocation. No server management. Fargate: serverless containers. ECS / EKS without managing nodes. Heavier per-second cost but no node ops. App Runner: managed container deploy. Push image; AWS handles the rest. The 'just want a URL' option.
S3 (Simple Storage Service): object storage. Web-accessible, durable, cheap. The default for files, backups, static sites, data lakes. EBS (Elastic Block Store): SSD/HDD volumes attached to EC2 instances. The 'disk' for VMs. EFS (Elastic File System): NFS-style shared filesystem. Multiple EC2s mount the same FS. S3 is the workhorse; EBS comes with EC2; EFS is rare unless you need shared filesystems.
RDS: managed Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server. Automated backups, patching, Multi-AZ. Aurora: AWS's own MySQL-compatible (or Postgres-compatible) DB. Better performance + price than RDS at scale; same interface. DynamoDB: managed NoSQL key-value + document. Scales to massive throughput. Different mental model from SQL. For learning: start with RDS Postgres. Aurora later. DynamoDB only when SQL doesn't fit.
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): isolated network in AWS. Subnets, route tables, internet gateways. Every account has a default; most non-trivial setups use custom VPCs. Route 53: DNS. Maps your domain to AWS resources. Health-aware (route traffic away from broken regions). CloudFront: CDN. Caches your content at edge locations worldwide. Reduces latency + origin load. ALB / NLB: Application Load Balancer (L7, HTTP-aware) and Network Load Balancer (L4, TCP-aware). The traffic distributors.
IAM (Identity and Access Management): WHO can do WHAT. Users, roles, policies. Everything else assumes IAM. We cover this deeply in do-aws-03. CloudWatch: metrics + logs + alarms. The default observability for everything AWS. CloudTrail: audit log of every API call. Find out 'who deleted that bucket'. Always-on; can't be disabled (rightly).
Pick the most reasonable shape.
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