Core Service Categories

The point: AWS has 200+ services, which is overwhelming at first. The trick is to learn the categories — most everyday work uses a handful of core services.

The main categories (and their headline services)

• Compute — run code and servers: EC2 (virtual machines), Lambda (serverless functions)
• Storage — store files and data: S3 (object storage), EBS (disks)
• Databases — RDS (managed SQL), DynamoDB (NoSQL)
• Networking — VPC (your private network), Route 53 (DNS), CloudFront (CDN)
• Security — IAM (who can do what)

Where to focus

If you learn EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM, and VPC, you can build and run real applications. Everything else you add as you need it.

💡 Tip: do not try to learn all 200 services. Master the core six in this list — the rest follow the same patterns.