AWS Services
AWS offers over 200 fully‑featured services, covering everything from foundational compute and storage to advanced artificial intelligence. For an engineer or architect, the first challenge is not learning every service but understanding how they are organised and which ones solve which problems.
This section groups AWS services into functional categories. Each category page explains what the services do, how they relate to one another, and where they fit in a typical cloud architecture. Use this hub to explore the ecosystem and find the right tools for your workload.
Service Categories
Compute
The compute category provides the processing power that runs your applications—from traditional virtual machines to serverless functions that execute code without managing servers.
- Amazon EC2
- Auto Scaling
- Elastic Load Balancing
- AWS Lambda
- AWS Batch
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS App Runner
Compute services are the foundation of most cloud architectures. You choose the model that matches your workload: long‑running applications on EC2, event‑driven logic on Lambda, or fully managed platforms with App Runner.
Networking
Networking services define how your cloud resources communicate, how traffic reaches them from the internet, and how they connect to on‑premises environments.
- Amazon VPC
- Route 53
- Elastic Load Balancing
- Global Accelerator
- CloudFront
- Direct Connect
- Transit Gateway
- PrivateLink
With these services you can build isolated private networks, distribute traffic globally, establish private connectivity to your data centres, and protect applications from network‑level threats.
Storage
Storage services provide durable, scalable places to keep data—whether it is unstructured objects, block‑level volumes for databases, or shared file systems.
- Amazon S3
- Amazon EBS
- Amazon EFS
- FSx
- AWS Backup
- Storage Gateway
Each storage type is optimised for different access patterns, performance requirements, and cost profiles. Understanding these differences is key to building cost‑effective, high‑performance systems.
Databases
AWS offers managed database services for relational, NoSQL, caching, and analytics workloads, removing the operational burden of patching, backups, and scaling.
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon Aurora
- DynamoDB
- ElastiCache
- Neptune
- Redshift
- DocumentDB
These services allow you to pair the right data model with your application, whether you need transactional consistency, sub‑millisecond key‑value lookups, or petabyte‑scale data warehousing.
Security & Identity
Security services help you manage access, protect data, detect threats, and maintain compliance across your AWS environment.
- IAM
- IAM Identity Center
- KMS
- Secrets Manager
- WAF
- Shield
- GuardDuty
- Inspector
- Security Hub
- Macie
Security in AWS is built around identity. IAM policies define who can do what, while encryption and threat‑detection services protect data and monitor for malicious activity.
Containers
Container services let you package applications with their dependencies and run them consistently across environments, with orchestration that handles deployment, scaling, and resilience.
- Amazon ECS
- Amazon EKS
- Amazon ECR
- App Runner
Containers are a core part of modern cloud‑native architectures. ECS and EKS give you orchestration at scale; App Runner abstracts away the infrastructure for simpler container‑based applications.
Serverless
Serverless services let you build and run applications without provisioning or managing servers. They automatically scale with demand and charge only for actual usage.
- AWS Lambda
- API Gateway
- EventBridge
- Step Functions
- SNS
- SQS
Serverless architectures are event‑driven by nature. Lambda functions respond to triggers from other AWS services, while API Gateway, EventBridge, and messaging services coordinate communication between components.
Analytics
Analytics services help you process, query, and visualise data at any scale, from batch processing to real‑time streams.
- Amazon Athena
- AWS Glue
- Kinesis
- EMR
- QuickSight
These services turn raw data into insights. You can run SQL queries on data lakes, prepare data for machine learning, and build streaming pipelines that react to events in real time.
AI & Machine Learning
AI and machine learning services provide pre‑built intelligence and platforms for training, deploying, and managing custom models.
- Amazon SageMaker
- Amazon Bedrock
- Rekognition
- Comprehend
- Textract
- Translate
- Polly
Whether you need to add image recognition to an application or build a custom generative AI model, these services offer capabilities at varying levels of abstraction—from fully managed APIs to deep platform control.
Developer Tools
Developer tools support the software development lifecycle, from source control and continuous integration to deployment and infrastructure as code.
- CodeCommit
- CodeBuild
- CodeDeploy
- CodePipeline
- Cloud9
These services enable automated, repeatable release processes. They integrate with AWS’s infrastructure‑as‑code offerings to deliver changes safely and quickly.
Management & Governance
Management and governance services provide visibility, control, and automation over your AWS resources, costs, and compliance posture.
- CloudWatch
- CloudTrail
- Config
- Systems Manager
- Organizations
- Control Tower
- Trusted Advisor
Operations at scale require centralised monitoring, logging, and policy enforcement. These services are the foundation of a well‑managed, multi‑account AWS environment.
Migration & Hybrid Cloud
Migration and hybrid services help you move existing workloads into AWS and extend the AWS operating model into on‑premises and edge environments.
- Application Migration Service
- Database Migration Service
- DataSync
- Transfer Family
- Snow Family
- Outposts
These services reduce the friction of large‑scale migrations and enable consistent hybrid architectures where applications span cloud and local infrastructure.
How to Learn AWS Services
A structured approach helps you build a solid foundation without getting lost in the breadth of the catalogue.
- Compute – Start with the execution environments that run your code.
- Networking – Understand how traffic flows and how resources are isolated.
- Storage – Learn where data lives and how it is protected.
- Security – Embed identity, access, and encryption into your mental model early.
- Databases – Explore the managed data stores that modern applications depend on.
- Containers – Add orchestrated, portable workloads to your toolkit.
- Serverless – Shift to event‑driven, zero‑infrastructure designs.
- Observability – Use monitoring, logging, and tracing to understand system behaviour.
- AI & Machine Learning – Integrate intelligence into your applications.
- Management & Governance – Bring order to multi‑account, multi‑team environments.
This progression mirrors the layers of a typical cloud architecture: you begin with the runtime, add networking and data, secure everything, and then adopt operational and governance practices that keep the system healthy.
Continue Learning
- AWS Concepts – The platform’s foundational ideas that explain why services work the way they do.
- AWS Architecture – Patterns and frameworks for combining services into resilient, scalable designs.
- AWS Best Practices – Operational and engineering guidance for building production‑grade systems.
- Cloud Foundations – The vendor‑neutral principles that underpin all AWS services.