7 AWS Services I Learned First — And What Each One Actually Does

When I first started learning AWS, I found the number of services a little overwhelming. Instead of trying to understand everything at once, I decided to learn by imagining a simple real-world application. For example, if I wanted to build a student notes application, I would need a place to run the application, somewhere to store files, a database to save user information, security controls, networking, and monitoring. This is where AWS services such as EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, VPC, Lambda, and CloudWatch started making sense to me—not as seven separate services, but as different pieces that work together to build and manage an application in the cloud.