AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a leading Cloud services provider. The product (service) offerings from AWS are enormous. For newbies, it may be difficult to understand what each Service is used for. In this short article I will give you a high level overview of the various AWS Services.
Instead of typing pages of information, I’ve compiled and distilled the core information and presented here in a tabular format. In this way, it can also act as a quick reference.
| Product/Service |
Category |
Usage |
| EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) | Compute | It is THE cloud computing power. An EC2 instance can be thought of a virtual server that runs OS of your choice with resizable hardware resources. With ELB (Elastic Load Balancing), Load is automatically distributed to multiple EC2 instances |
| Lambda | Compute | Run code of virtually any type of application without prior provisioning of servers. |
| EC2 Container Service | Compute | Run scalable container service that supports Docker containers. |
| Elastic Beanstalk | Compute | Deploy applications (written in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, .net, node.js, Go) on servers like nginx, apache, IIS |
| VI Import/Export | Compute | Export and import Virtual machine images. |
| S3 (Simple Storage Service) | Storage | Store data. Highly scalable and safe storage |
| Glacier | Storage | Store data for long term archiving |
| EBS (Elastic Block Store) | Storage | Highly available block-level storage volume. |
| EFS (Elastic File System) | Storage | Shared File storage service |
| Storage Gateway | Storage | Connect on-premise applications with cloud storage seamlessly. |
| Cloud Front | Content Delivery | Content delivery web service. Provides low latency and high transfer rates |
| Import/export snowball | Content delivery | Transfer large amount of data (petabyte scale) in and out of AWS |
| RDS (Relational Database Service) | Database | Fully managed RDBMS service that can provide instances of Oracle,SQL Server, MySQL,PostgreSQL,AuroraDB,MariaDB |
| Aurora | Database | MySQL compatible fast, reliable RDBMS |
| Database Migration Service | Database | Migrate on-premise Database to Cloud |
| DynamoDB | Database | NoSQL Database service (Document based data model or key-value data model) |
| RedShift | Database | Petabyte scale Data Warehouse |
| ElasticCache | Database | In-memory cache (Memcached and Redis) |
| VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) | Networking | User defined virtual network within AWS Cloud |
| Direct Connect | Networking | Dedicated network link between on-premise and AWS Cloud |
| Route 53 | Networking | Reliable DNS (Domain Name System) |
| CodeCommit | Dev Tools | Fully Managed Source Control service (Private GIT repositories) |
| CodeDeploy | Dev Tools | Automate code deployment to any instance |
| CodePipeline | Dev Tools | Delivery service for Application updates |
| CloudWatch | Management Tools | Collect and track metrics from AWS resources. Create alerts. |
| CloudFormation | Management Tools | Create and manage collection of AWS resources. GUI available. |
| CloudTrail | Management Tools | Record audit trail of AWS calls |
| AWS Config | Management Tools | Provides resource inventory, configuration and history. Config Rules enable maintaining the configuration. |
| OpsWorks | Management Tools | Chef instance for managing application configuration. |
| Service Catalog | Management Tools | Create and manage catalogs of IT services |
| Trusted Advisor | Management Tools | Automatically inspects and recommends changes to improve cost effectiveness, performance and security |
| IAM (Identity and Access Management) | Security | Create and manage users and roles to control access to AWS resources |
| KMS (Key management Service) | Security | Create and control Security Keys. Uses HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) |
| Directory Service | Security | Connects AWS resources to existing Active Directory or lets you create a new standalone directory in the Cloud |
| Inspector | Security | Automated Security assessment service. |
| WAF (Web Application Firewall) | Security | Protects Web Applications from common exploits. |
| CloudHSM (Hardware Security module) | Security | Dedicated HSM appliance within cloud |
| EMR (Elastic MapReduce) | Analytics | Managed apache Hadoop framework for processing big data |
| QuickSight | Analytics | BI (Business Intelligence) service |
| Data Pipeline | Analytics | Reliably move data between AWS services and on-premise data sources |
| Elastic Search Service | Analytics | Managed Elastic Search service |
| Kinesis | Analytics | Load, Analyze and Stream data from the cloud (Two services: Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Amazon Kinesis Streams |
| ML (Machine Learning) | Machine Learning | Visualization and Wizards for Machine Learning models and algorithms |
| IoT (Internet of Things) | IoT | Gather and process data from connected devises and manage interaction with AWS resources |
| Mobile Hub | Mobile Services | Build mobile apps on AWS |
| Cognito | Mobile Services | Save mobile user data in AWS |
| Device Farm | Mobile Services | Mobile App testing service |
| Mobile Analytics | Mobile Services | Measure App usage and revenue |
| SNS (Simple Notification Service) | Mobile Services | Full managed Pub-Sub messaging service |
| Mobile SDK | Mobile Services | Build mobile apps (ios, android, fireos) |
| API Gateway | Application Services | Create, Publish, Manage, Monitor and Secure APIs. |
| AppStream | Application Services | Deliver windows applications to any device without any code changes |
| CloudSearch | Application Services | Search solution for Applications and websites in the cloud |
| Elastic Transcoder | Application Services | Convert media types from one format to another |
| SES (Simple Email Service) | Application Services | Email Service |
| SQS (Simple Queue Service) | Application Services | Message Queueing Service (No limit in volume or throughput) |
| SWF (Simple WorkFlow) | Application Services | Build and run background jobs |
| Workspaces | Enterprise Applications | Managed desktop service in the cloud. |
| WorkDocs | Enterprise Applications | Enterprise storage and sharing service for documents |
| WorkMail | Enterprise Applications | Business email and calendaring service in the cloud. |
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