Are You New to AWS? Start Here with These Core Services (quick cheat sheet to cover AWS in 4 Minutes)

In this post, we are going to cover AWS Core Services for beginners. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading cloud platform, offering a wide range of cloud services designed to enable businesses to scale and grow rapidly. For beginners, understanding these core services is essential as they are the backbone of any cloud infrastructure setup on AWS.

We are going to cover an overview of each of the following aspects of AWS Core Services:

• Overview of AWS Core Services
• AWS Compute Services
• AWS Storage Services
• AWS Networking and Content Delivery
• AWS Database Services
• AWS Security, Identity, and Compliance
• AWS Management and Governance
• AWS Analytics Services
• AWS DevOps and Developer Tools
• AWS Machine Learning Services
• FAQs

1.) Overview of AWS Core Services

AWS offers over 200 fully featured services across multiple domains, including compute, storage, networking, databases, security, and more. These services are built to be highly scalable, secure, and cost-efficient, making them suitable for businesses of all sizes. AWS provides the flexibility to run everything from small web applications to enterprise-level workloads on a global infrastructure.

2.) AWS Compute Services

Compute services are the backbone of AWS, providing the processing power needed to run applications.

• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): Virtual servers in the cloud that offer scalable compute capacity. EC2 instances can be tailored to your needs with different instance types (memory, CPU, storage, etc.).

  Example CLI Command to launch an EC2 instance:

  aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-12345678 --count 1 --instance-type t2.micro --key-name MyKeyPair
  

• Amazon Lambda: A serverless compute service that automatically manages the underlying infrastructure for running code in response to events. You only pay for the compute time you use.

• Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service): A fully managed container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and integrates seamlessly with other AWS services.

• Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service): A managed service that allows you to run Kubernetes on AWS without managing the control plane.
  

• AWS Fargate: A serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. With Fargate, you don’t have to provision or manage servers; AWS handles the infrastructure for you.

• AWS Batch: A fully managed service that allows you to run batch computing jobs at any scale. It automatically provisions the required compute resources and handles the execution of jobs.

• Amazon Lightsail: A simplified service that offers virtual private servers (VPS), databases, object storage, and more at a predictable, low cost. It’s ideal for simple workloads like websites, blogs, and small applications.

• AWS Outposts: A fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, and tools to your on-premises data center or edge location. It’s designed for workloads that require low latency or local data processing.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: A Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows you to deploy and manage applications in various programming languages without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure. It automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and monitoring.

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: A service that automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in response to demand, ensuring that your application has the right amount of resources at all times. You can configure it to scale up when demand increases and scale down during off-peak hours to save costs.

• Amazon EC2 Spot Instances: These are spare EC2 instances that are available at a discounted price compared to On-Demand instances. Spot Instances are ideal for stateless, fault-tolerant workloads that can handle interruptions, such as big data, batch processing, and containerized workloads.

• AWS App Runner: A fully managed service that makes it easy to build, deploy, and scale containerized web applications and APIs quickly without needing to manage infrastructure.

• Amazon Wavelength: A service that brings AWS compute and storage to the edge of 5G networks, enabling ultra-low latency applications, such as machine learning inference at the edge, autonomous vehicles, and IoT.

• AWS Lambda@Edge: A service that lets you run Lambda functions at AWS Edge locations in response to CloudFront events, enabling the deployment of serverless code closer to users for lower latency.

• AWS Serverless Application Repository: A curated repository of serverless applications that you can use to accelerate development, ranging from AI to data processing, saving time and effort in building serverless applications from scratch.

3.) AWS Storage Services

Storage is another essential component of AWS, providing various options to store and manage data securely and efficiently.

• Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): Object storage designed to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. S3 provides high availability, durability, and security for data storage.

• Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store): Block storage for use with EC2 instances. EBS volumes provide persistent storage that can be attached to EC2 instances.

• Amazon EFS (Elastic File System): A scalable, elastic file storage service that provides file-level access for AWS services and on-premises resources.

• Amazon S3 Glacier: Low-cost archival storage designed for long-term data retention and compliance.

• Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive: The lowest-cost storage class in Amazon S3, designed for long-term data that is rarely accessed. It provides secure, durable, and extremely low-cost data archiving for applications with infrequent retrieval needs.

• Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering: An S3 storage class designed to optimize costs by automatically moving data between two access tiers when access patterns change. It is ideal for data with unpredictable access patterns.

• Amazon FSx for Windows File Server: A fully managed Windows file system built on Microsoft Windows Server, providing the native Windows file system features needed for your business-critical applications.

• Amazon FSx for Lustre: A fully managed file system that is optimized for high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning, and other data-intensive workloads. FSx for Lustre is ideal for use cases requiring fast, scalable storage.

• AWS Storage Gateway: A hybrid cloud storage service that gives you on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. It seamlessly connects your on-premises software with cloud-based storage solutions, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.

• Amazon Backup: A fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centrally automate and manage backups across AWS services, such as EC2, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, and more. It helps ensure compliance with your organization's backup policies.

• AWS Snowball: A data transport solution that uses secure physical devices to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS. Snowball can be used for migration, disaster recovery, or data processing in disconnected environments.

• AWS Snowcone: The smallest member of the AWS Snow Family, Snowcone is a portable device that can be used to collect, process, and transfer data to AWS in edge locations or remote areas with limited connectivity.

4.) AWS Networking and Content Delivery

Networking services in AWS allow you to connect and secure your resources across regions and globally.

• Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): A private network in AWS that allows you to launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network.

• Amazon Route 53: A scalable DNS and domain name registration service that routes traffic to your applications hosted on AWS or elsewhere.

• Amazon CloudFront: A fast content delivery network (CDN) that delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency.

• AWS Direct Connect: A dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS, providing a more consistent network experience compared to standard internet-based connections.

• AWS Transit Gateway: Enables you to connect your Amazon VPCs and on-premises networks through a central hub, simplifying your network architecture for large-scale environments.

• AWS Global Accelerator: Improves availability and performance for your global applications by routing traffic to the optimal AWS endpoint based on health, geography, and network performance.

• AWS PrivateLink: Provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises networks, using the AWS backbone without exposing traffic to the public internet.

• AWS VPN (Virtual Private Network): Establishes secure, encrypted connections from your on-premises network or other remote networks to your Amazon VPCs.

• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Automatically distributes incoming application or network traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, ensuring high availability.

• AWS Network Firewall: A managed firewall service that provides network traffic inspection and protection against threats for your VPC.

• AWS App Mesh: A service mesh that enables you to manage and monitor the communication between microservices in your application, improving security and performance.

5.) AWS Database Services

AWS offers a variety of fully managed database services to store and manage structured and unstructured data.

• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): A managed relational database service that supports multiple database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server.

• Amazon DynamoDB: A fully managed NoSQL database service designed for high-availability, scalable applications, and key-value data.

• Amazon Aurora: A MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, offering performance and availability at a lower cost.

• Amazon Redshift: A fully managed data warehouse service designed for complex analytical queries against large datasets.
  

• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility): A managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. It provides scalability and performance for document-based applications.

• Amazon Neptune: A fully managed graph database service supporting both property graph and RDF graph models. It is optimized for applications that require querying relationships and network data.

• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra): A scalable, managed NoSQL database service compatible with Apache Cassandra. It allows you to run Cassandra workloads on AWS without managing infrastructure.

• Amazon Timestream: A time-series database service designed for storing and analyzing time-stamped data like IoT sensor data or application logs. It provides fast ingestion and querying capabilities.

• Amazon QLDB (Quantum Ledger Database): A fully managed ledger database that provides an immutable and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. It is designed for use cases requiring a complete and verifiable history of changes.

• Amazon RDS Proxy: A fully managed database proxy that helps improve application availability and performance by managing database connections and reducing the overhead of connection management.

6.) AWS Security, Identity, and Compliance

Security and compliance services help manage access, monitor activities, and ensure that your data and applications are secure.

• AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management): Manage access to AWS resources securely by creating and managing AWS users, groups, and permissions.

• AWS Shield: A managed DDoS protection service designed to safeguard applications running on AWS.

• Amazon GuardDuty: A continuous security monitoring service that analyzes and identifies potential threats to your AWS accounts, workloads, and data.

• AWS Key Management Service (KMS): A managed service that enables you to easily create and control the encryption keys used to secure your data.
  

• AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall): Protects your web applications from common web exploits and attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).

• Amazon Macie: A data security service that uses machine learning to automatically discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in AWS, like personally identifiable information (PII).

• AWS Secrets Manager: A service that helps you protect access to your applications by securely storing and rotating database credentials, API keys, and other secrets.

• AWS CloudHSM (Hardware Security Module): A cloud-based hardware security module that allows you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys in the AWS cloud.

• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM): A service that allows you to provision, manage, and deploy SSL/TLS certificates for your AWS-based websites and applications.

• Amazon Detective: An investigative service that helps you analyze and visualize security data to quickly get to the root of potential security issues.

• AWS Security Hub: Provides a comprehensive view of your high-priority security alerts and security posture across your AWS accounts, integrating with other AWS security services.

• AWS Artifact: A resource for on-demand access to AWS security and compliance reports, including SOC reports, PCI compliance documentation, and ISO certifications.

7.) AWS Management and Governance

AWS management and governance tools help you manage and monitor your AWS resources and optimize their usage.

• Amazon CloudWatch: A monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and applications that provides metrics and log data, enabling you to set alarms, view graphs, and automate responses to changes.

• AWS CloudFormation: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service that allows you to define and provision AWS infrastructure with code templates.

• AWS Config: A service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.

• AWS Systems Manager: Provides a unified interface to manage your AWS resources, automate operations, and monitor systems.
  

• AWS CloudTrail: Tracks and logs API calls made on your AWS account, providing a record of actions taken to monitor and audit activity.

• AWS Service Catalog: Enables organizations to create and manage approved catalogs of resources and services for easier and compliant provisioning.

• AWS Trusted Advisor: Provides real-time guidance to help you provision your AWS resources following best practices in areas such as cost optimization, security, and performance.

• AWS License Manager: Helps manage and track your software licenses from various vendors, ensuring compliance and optimizing license usage.

• AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store: A secure storage for configuration data and secrets management, integrating with other AWS services for parameter and secrets retrieval.

• AWS Cost Explorer: Analyzes and visualizes your AWS spending patterns and usage over time to help optimize costs and manage budgets.

• AWS Budgets: Allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive alerts when your usage or spending exceeds predefined thresholds.

• AWS Organizations: Facilitates management of multiple AWS accounts, enabling centralized billing, policy enforcement, and consolidated reporting across accounts.

• AWS Backup: Provides centralized backup management for AWS services, allowing you to automate backups and manage data protection policies.

8.) AWS Analytics Services

AWS analytics services allow you to collect, process, and analyze data at scale.

• Amazon Athena: An interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

• Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce): A cloud big data platform that simplifies running big data frameworks such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.

• AWS Glue: A fully managed ETL (extract, transform, load) service that makes it easy to prepare data for analytics.

• Amazon QuickSight: A scalable, serverless business intelligence (BI) service that lets you build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and get business insights from your data.
  

• Amazon Kinesis: A platform for real-time data processing and analytics. It includes services like Kinesis Data Streams for real-time data streaming and Kinesis Data Firehose for streaming data ingestion.

• Amazon Redshift Spectrum: Extends Amazon Redshift’s capabilities by allowing you to run queries against data in Amazon S3 without having to load it into Redshift first.

• AWS Data Pipeline: A web service that helps you automate the movement and transformation of data. It integrates with other AWS services and on-premises data sources to process and analyze data.

• AWS Lake Formation: A service that simplifies the process of setting up, managing, and securing a data lake. It helps in ingesting, cataloging, and securing data from various sources.

• Amazon Timestream: A time series database service designed to handle and analyze time-stamped data, such as metrics and log data, with built-in support for time series analysis.

• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus: A fully managed service that enables you to monitor and alert on your Prometheus metrics without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure.

• Amazon Managed Service for Grafana: A fully managed service that enables you to create and share dashboards for visualizing metrics from AWS and other sources.

9.) AWS DevOps and Developer Tools

These services help streamline development, testing, and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

• AWS CodeBuild: A fully managed build service that compiles your source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages.

• AWS CodeDeploy: Automates the deployment of applications to a variety of compute services such as EC2, Lambda, and ECS.

• AWS CodePipeline: A continuous integration and delivery service that automates the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process.

• AWS Cloud9: A cloud-based IDE that allows you to write, run, and debug code from your browser.
  

• AWS CodeStar: An integrated development environment that provides tools and project templates to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS.

• AWS X-Ray: Helps with debugging and analyzing microservices applications by providing insights into the performance of your applications and services.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: A platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that simplifies the deployment and scaling of web applications and services. You just upload your code, and Elastic Beanstalk handles the deployment.

• AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model): An open-source framework that simplifies the process of building serverless applications. It includes tools for local development, deployment, and management.

• AWS Fargate: A serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, eliminating the need to manage servers or clusters.

• AWS CloudFormation: Allows you to define and provision AWS infrastructure using code, enabling you to deploy and manage resources in a repeatable and predictable manner.

• AWS CodeCommit: A fully managed source control service that hosts secure and scalable private Git repositories.

• AWS CodeArtifact: A fully managed artifact repository service that makes it easy to securely store and share software packages used in your development process.

• AWS OpsWorks: A configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet, allowing you to automate server configuration, deployment, and management.

• AWS Systems Manager: Provides operational data from multiple AWS services and allows you to automate tasks across AWS resources, such as patch management and configuration compliance.

10.) AWS Machine Learning Services

AWS provides a range of machine learning services and tools to help developers create, train, and deploy machine learning models.

• Amazon SageMaker: A fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale.

• AWS DeepLens: An AI-enabled video camera that runs deep learning models for image and video analysis.

• Amazon Polly: A service that turns text into lifelike speech, enabling applications to “speak” to users.

• Amazon Rekognition: A deep learning-based service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications.
  

• Amazon Comprehend: A natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to uncover insights and relationships in text.

• Amazon Translate: A neural machine translation service that provides language translation in multiple languages, enabling applications to reach a global audience.

• Amazon Lex: A service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text, powered by the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa.

• Amazon Forecast: A fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver accurate forecasts based on historical data.

• Amazon Personalize: A machine learning service that enables developers to build individualized recommendations for users based on their interactions with the application.

• AWS Inferentia: A machine learning inference chip designed to provide high performance and low latency for deep learning models at scale.

• Amazon Textract: A service that automatically extracts text, forms, and tables from scanned documents using machine learning.

Conclusion

In this post, we covered AWS Core Services for beginners. AWS provides an extensive suite of services that cater to different cloud needs, from compute and storage to machine learning and analytics. Understanding these core services is the first step toward building and scaling applications in the cloud.

AWS allows businesses to leverage modern cloud infrastructure without upfront costs, offering pay-as-you-go pricing across all services. Start exploring AWS services via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or by using Infrastructure as Code tools like CloudFormation and Terraform.

FAQs

1. What are AWS Core Services?
AWS Core Services include the primary compute, storage, networking, and database services that form the foundation of most AWS cloud architectures.

2. How can I get started with AWS?
You can start by signing up for an AWS account, exploring the AWS Free Tier, and accessing AWS training resources to learn the basics.

3. What is the benefit of using AWS over traditional infrastructure?
AWS provides scalability, flexibility, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing businesses to scale resources according to demand and avoid upfront hardware costs.

4. Which AWS services should I start with as a beginner?
For beginners, start with Amazon EC2 for compute, Amazon S3 for storage, and Amazon RDS for relational databases.