Amazon Web Services explained in simple terms.

Getting started in Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be quite overwhelming and confusing, particulary when all the different products they offer come with quite strange and technical names. This guide aims to help simplify the terminology, describe why they’re useful & what you can do with them all.

Amazon Web Services basics

The Basics

No matter what you do with AWS you'll probably end up using some of these services as they'll be the base for most apps.

EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud

General purpose Virtual Private Servers (VPS) that can be rented by the hour and can be quickly and easily configured to run your own applications.

Lambda

Cloud based functions you can run on demand without having to worry about provisioning or managing actual servers.

Lightsail

Simplified deployment and fixed cost billing for some AWS resources, including VPS, DNS, storage, databases & load balancers.

Similar ToDigital Ocean, Linode

RDS Relational Database Service

Managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgresSQL & MariaDB).

S3 Simple Storage Service

File/Block storage that can be used to store images and other assets for websites, keep backups and share files between services.

Similar ToGoogle Cloud Storage

Analytics

CloudSearch

Fulltext document search service (like ElasticSearch).

Similar ToElasticSearch, Solr

Computing power

EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud

General purpose Virtual Private Servers (VPS) that can be rented by the hour and can be quickly and easily configured to run your own applications.

Lambda

Cloud based functions you can run on demand without having to worry about provisioning or managing actual servers.

Containers

ECR Elastic Container Registry

Store manage and deploy docker images like on Dockerhub.

Similar ToDockerhub

ECS Elastic Container Service

Scalable and reliable way to run and orchestrate container services (such as Docker).

EKS Elastic Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes as a service.

Databases

Aurora

Scalable and high performance managed relational databases. (MySQL and PostgreSQL).

DynamoDB

Large & scalable non-relational (noSQL) databases.

Similar ToMongoDB

ElastiCache

Managed memcache and redis machines.

Similar ToRedis to Go

RDS Relational Database Service

Managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgresSQL & MariaDB).

Deployment

CloudFormation

Templates and scripts to programatically create and configure AWS components (such as Databases and EC2 instances).

Similar ToTerraform

Elastic Beanstalk

Quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications.

Email / Notifications

SES Simple Email Service

Send one-off transactional emails for things like password resets and notifications.

Similar ToSendGrid, Mandrill

Identity

Cognito

Add user login and password management to your web and mobile apps. Supports ability to log in with Email, Google, Facebook, etc.

Similar ToAuth0, Okta

IAM Identity & Access Management

Create and manage AWS users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources securely.

Lightsail

Lightsail Block Storage

Lightsail Block Storage

Lightsail Load Balancers

Lightsail Load balancers

Lightsail Managed Databases

Lightsail RDS databases

Lightsail Virtual Servers

Lightsail Virtual servers

Networking

API Gateway

An API proxy that lets you connect to different backend and services. Supports RESTful and WebSocket APIs.

CloudFront

Content Delivery Network and edge caching.

Similar ToCloudflare, Akamai

Route 53

Manage domain names and DNS records.

Similar ToGoDaddy, Namecheap

Security

Certificate Manager

Provision, manage and deploy SSL certificates.

Secrets Manager

Securely store secrets as key/value pairs. Can automatically rotate secrets.

WAF Web Application Firewall

AWS Firewall services that allows you to block bad requests to Cloudfront protected sites and services.

Storage

S3 Simple Storage Service

File/Block storage that can be used to store images and other assets for websites, keep backups and share files between services.

Similar ToGoogle Cloud Storage