11/05/2026
1. Compute and Orchestration
This is the "brain" of your application, ranging from serverless to containerized environments.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): Provides virtual servers. You have full control over the OS and software, making it ideal for legacy apps or specific custom configurations.
Lambda: A serverless, event-driven compute service. It runs code in response to triggers (like an S3 upload or an API call) without you managing any underlying servers.
ECS (Elastic Container Service) & EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service):
ECS is AWS’s native container orchestrator, known for its deep integration with other AWS services.
EKS is a managed Kubernetes service, best for teams that want the flexibility of the K8s ecosystem with AWS managing the control plane.
2. Storage and Databases
How your application persists and retrieves data.
S3 (Simple Storage Service): Object storage used for hosting static assets, backups, or "data lakes." It is highly durable and virtually infinitely scalable.
DynamoDB: A NoSQL key-value database designed for single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It’s serverless and handles high-traffic workloads effortlessly.
RDS (Relational Database Service): A managed service for traditional SQL databases (like PostgreSQL or MySQL). It automates patching, backups, and scaling.
3. Networking and Content Delivery
The skeleton that connects your resources and ensures they are reachable and secure.
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): Your private, isolated section of the AWS cloud. This is where you define IP ranges, subnets, and route tables to secure your resources.
ELB (Elastic Load Balancing): Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances or containers, to ensure high availability.
Route 53: A highly available Domain Name System (DNS) service. It connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS (like your Load Balancer or S3 bucket).
How They Work Together
In a typical production environment, these services often follow a flow similar to this:
Route 53 directs the user to an ELB.
The ELB sends the traffic to ECS/EKS containers or EC2 instances residing within a VPC.
The application logic might trigger a Lambda function for background processing.
The application reads/writes data to DynamoDB or RDS and stores static files or logs in S3.
