AWS is overly complex.
Here is AWS in plain English, covering 95% of the services you actually need to know: 👇
EC2 - your virtual server (raw compute, you manage everything)
S3 - unlimited object storage (files, images, backups, static sites — up to 5TB per file)
RDS - managed relational database (MySQL, Postgres, no patching headaches)
DynamoDB - managed NoSQL database (serverless, scales to millions of requests)
VPC - your private network (isolated space, you control the rules)
IAM - who can access what (users, roles, policies — security foundation)
Security Group - firewall for your resources (allow/deny traffic at instance level)
ECS - managed container orchestration service (AWS handles the cluster)
EKS - managed Kubernetes (you bring K8s knowledge, AWS handles control plane)
ECR - private container registry (store and pull your Docker images)
Lambda - serverless functions (run code on events, pay per execution)
Fargate - serverless compute for ECS/EKS (no underlying EC2s to manage at all)
ALB - Layer 7 load balancer (routes by URL path, host, headers)
NLB - Layer 4 load balancer (ultra-low latency, TCP/UDP traffic)
Route 53 - DNS health checks routing policies
CloudFront - CDN (caches content globally, speeds up delivery)
API Gateway - managed API endpoint (connects frontend to Lambda or backend)
Auto Scaling - adds/removes compute resources (like EC2s or ECS tasks) based on demand
CloudWatch - logs, metrics, alarms (your observability layer)
CloudTrail - records every API call (audit trail, who did what)
Systems Manager - manage EC2s without SSH (patch, run commands remotely)
CodePipeline - CI/CD pipeline orchestration
CodeBuild - managed build service (compiles, tests your code)
CodeDeploy - automated deployments to EC2, ECS, Lambda
CloudFormation - infrastructure as code (define AWS resources in YAML/JSON)
Secrets Manager - store and rotate secrets securely
SNS - pub/sub messaging (fan out notifications to multiple subscribers)
SQS - message queue (decouple services, buffer workloads)
That covers 95% of real-world AWS.
The mental model:
VPC is your datacenter.
EC2/ECS/EKS/Lambda are how you run workloads.
S3/RDS/DynamoDB store your data.
IAM locks everything down.
CloudWatch watches everything.
The rest is glue.
#AWS #CloudComputing #DevOps #SystemArchitecture