Core AWS Services Every Beginner Should Know
AWS lists well over 200 services, which can feel overwhelming. In practice, most applications are built from a small core set. Learning these first gives you a map for everything else.
Compute: where your code runs
Amazon EC2 provides virtual servers. You choose the operating system, CPU, memory, and storage, and you are responsible for patching and managing the machine. It is the most flexible option and the closest to a traditional server. AWS Lambda runs your code in response to events without any server management, and you pay only while the code executes. For containers, Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS (managed Kubernetes) handle orchestration.
Storage: keeping your data
Amazon S3 is object storage for files of nearly any kind, such as images, backups, logs, and static websites. It is designed for extremely high durability and is one of the most widely used AWS services. Amazon EBS provides block storage, which acts like a hard disk attached to an EC2 instance. Amazon EFS offers a shared file system that many instances can mount at once.
Databases: structured data at scale
Amazon RDS runs managed relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, handling backups, patching, and failover for you. Amazon Aurora is AWS's cloud-built relational engine compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database that delivers fast performance at almost any scale.
Networking: connecting everything
Amazon VPC lets you build a private, isolated network in the cloud, with subnets, route tables, and security rules. Route 53 is a DNS service that maps domain names to your resources. CloudFront is a content delivery network that caches content near your users for faster loading.
Identity and access
AWS IAM controls who can do what in your account. Every other service depends on it, which is why it gets its own article on security later in this series.
A simple example architecture
Imagine a small web application. Static files such as HTML, CSS, and images sit in S3 and are served through CloudFront. The backend runs on EC2 or Lambda inside a VPC. User data lives in RDS or DynamoDB. Route 53 points your domain at the whole system, and IAM roles give each component only the permissions it needs. That single diagram uses almost every service above, which is why they are worth learning first.
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