AWS Global Services List: Exploring Cloud Offerings

The AWS services landscape has gotten complicated with all the new launches, category shuffles, and overlapping capabilities flying around. As someone who has worked with AWS for years across dozens of accounts and workloads, I learned everything there is to know about what’s available and when to use each service. Today, I will share it all with you.

AWS has over 200 services. Nobody masters all of them. But understanding the major categories and knowing which services live in each one gives you the map you need to navigate the ecosystem. Think of this guide as your reference — something to come back to when you encounter a new requirement and need to know what AWS offers for it.

Compute Services

Probably should have led with this section, honestly. Compute is the foundation of everything you’ll build on AWS. Here’s what’s available:

Amazon EC2 is the original and still the most flexible compute option. Virtual servers that you can configure with any operating system, any software, any network configuration. I use EC2 when I need full control over the computing environment or when the application isn’t a good fit for containers or serverless.

AWS Lambda is the serverless compute service that changed how I think about architecture. Write your function code, define a trigger, and Lambda handles everything else — provisioning, scaling, patching, monitoring. No servers to manage. You pay only for the compute time you consume, measured in milliseconds. For event-driven workloads and APIs, Lambda is my default starting point.

Amazon ECS and EKS handle container orchestration. ECS is AWS’s native container orchestration service — simpler to set up, deeply integrated with other AWS services, and my recommendation for teams getting started with containers. EKS runs managed Kubernetes for teams that need Kubernetes compatibility or are already running Kubernetes on-premises.

AWS Fargate is the serverless compute engine for containers. It removes the need to provision and manage servers for your ECS or EKS workloads. I think of Fargate as “Lambda for containers” — you define your container, specify the resources it needs, and Fargate handles the infrastructure.

Elastic Beanstalk simplifies application deployment by handling provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling. It’s opinionated about infrastructure choices, which makes it fast to deploy with but less flexible for custom requirements.

AWS Batch handles batch computing workloads. If you have thousands of jobs to process in parallel — data processing, financial modeling, genomics analysis — Batch manages the compute resources and job scheduling.

Storage Services

Storage on AWS is remarkably diverse, with different services optimized for different access patterns and durability requirements.

Amazon S3 is the object storage service that stores practically unlimited data at incredibly low cost. I use S3 for everything: static websites, data lake storage, application artifacts, backups, log archives. With 11 nines of durability, your data is safer in S3 than anywhere else. S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between access tiers based on usage patterns, which optimizes costs without any effort on your part.

Amazon EBS provides block storage volumes for EC2 instances. Think of EBS as the hard drive for your virtual servers. Different volume types (gp3, io2, st1, sc1) offer different performance and cost characteristics. I default to gp3 for general workloads — it provides solid baseline performance at a reasonable price.

Amazon EFS is the fully managed NFS file system that can be mounted by multiple EC2 instances simultaneously. It’s perfect for shared file storage scenarios like content management systems, development environments, and media processing workflows.

AWS Storage Gateway bridges your on-premises storage with AWS cloud storage, enabling hybrid architectures where local applications can seamlessly access S3 data.

Amazon FSx provides managed file systems for specific workloads: FSx for Windows File Server (SMB shares), FSx for Lustre (high-performance computing), FSx for NetApp ONTAP (enterprise NAS), and FSx for OpenZFS.

Database Options

That’s what makes the AWS database portfolio endearing to us cloud architects — there’s a purpose-built database for virtually every data model and access pattern. I covered these in depth in my database services guide, but here’s the quick summary:

• Amazon RDS: Managed relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MariaDB)
• Amazon Aurora: Cloud-native relational database with MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility
• Amazon DynamoDB: Managed NoSQL key-value and document database
• Amazon ElastiCache: Managed Redis and Memcached for in-memory caching
• Amazon Neptune: Graph database for connected data
• Amazon Keyspaces: Managed Cassandra-compatible database
• Amazon DocumentDB: MongoDB-compatible document database
• Amazon Timestream: Time series database for IoT and metrics
• Amazon QLDB: Ledger database for immutable transaction records
• Amazon Redshift: Data warehouse for analytical queries

Networking and Content Delivery

Networking on AWS is where the real architecture decisions happen. Getting the network design right is foundational to everything else.

Amazon VPC is the virtual network that isolates your AWS resources. Every serious deployment starts with VPC design — CIDR blocks, subnet layout, routing tables, internet gateways, NAT gateways. I always design VPCs with future growth in mind, using non-overlapping CIDR ranges and separating public, private, and isolated subnets clearly.

Amazon CloudFront is the CDN that caches content at edge locations worldwide. I put CloudFront in front of virtually every web-facing application for both performance and security benefits. Combined with WAF, it protects your origin while delivering content with low latency globally.

Amazon Route 53 handles DNS management, health checking, and traffic routing. The routing policies (simple, weighted, latency-based, failover, geolocation) give you sophisticated traffic management capabilities that I use for everything from blue-green deployments to multi-region architectures.

AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated network connections from your on-premises data center to AWS. If you’re pushing significant data volumes or need consistent network performance between your data center and AWS, Direct Connect is worth the investment.

Elastic Load Balancing distributes traffic across targets. Application Load Balancers (ALB) for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, Network Load Balancers (NLB) for TCP/UDP with ultra-low latency, and Gateway Load Balancers (GLB) for third-party virtual appliances.

Security and Identity Services

Security services on AWS deserve careful attention because they form the foundation of your compliance and risk management posture.

AWS IAM controls who can do what in your AWS account. Users, groups, roles, policies — IAM is the most important service to understand thoroughly. I’ve seen more security incidents caused by overly permissive IAM policies than any other root cause.

AWS KMS manages encryption keys for your data at rest. I encrypt everything — EBS volumes, S3 buckets, RDS instances, DynamoDB tables. KMS makes it straightforward with managed keys or customer-managed keys.

Amazon GuardDuty is the intelligent threat detection service that monitors your accounts for malicious activity. It analyzes CloudTrail logs, VPC flow logs, and DNS logs to identify threats. Enable it in every account and region — it’s one of those services where the cost is trivial compared to the value.

AWS Security Hub aggregates security findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, and third-party tools into a single dashboard. It maps findings against compliance frameworks like CIS and PCI DSS, making compliance audits much more manageable.

AWS WAF protects web applications from common exploits. Combined with CloudFront, it provides global protection against SQL injection, XSS, and DDoS attacks.

Amazon Cognito handles user authentication and authorization for your applications. User pools for sign-up and sign-in, identity pools for granting AWS access to authenticated users.

Analytics and Machine Learning

AWS’s analytics and ML portfolio has expanded dramatically, covering everything from basic data querying to advanced AI model deployment.

• Amazon Athena: Serverless SQL queries against S3 data
• Amazon Kinesis: Real-time data streaming and processing
• Amazon EMR: Managed Hadoop and Spark clusters for big data processing
• AWS Glue: Serverless ETL for data integration and catalog management
• Amazon QuickSight: Business intelligence and visualization dashboards
• Amazon SageMaker: End-to-end machine learning platform
• Amazon Bedrock: Foundation model access for generative AI applications
• Amazon Comprehend: NLP service for text analysis and sentiment detection
• Amazon Rekognition: Computer vision for image and video analysis
• Amazon Polly: Text-to-speech service
• Amazon Transcribe: Speech-to-text service

Management and Governance

These services help you manage, monitor, and govern your AWS environment at scale:

• AWS CloudFormation: Infrastructure as Code for defining and provisioning AWS resources
• AWS CloudTrail: Logs every API call in your account for auditing and compliance
• Amazon CloudWatch: Monitoring, logging, and alerting for your resources and applications
• AWS Config: Tracks resource configurations and evaluates them against compliance rules
• AWS Organizations: Multi-account management with consolidated billing and policy enforcement
• AWS Systems Manager: Operational management for your EC2 instances and on-premises servers
• AWS Trusted Advisor: Automated best practice recommendations for cost, performance, security, and fault tolerance

Application Integration

Integration services connect your applications and enable event-driven, loosely coupled architectures:

• Amazon SQS: Managed message queues for decoupling application components
• Amazon SNS: Pub/sub messaging for notifications and fan-out patterns
• Amazon EventBridge: Serverless event bus for connecting applications with events
• AWS Step Functions: Orchestration for complex, multi-step workflows
• Amazon API Gateway: Managed API creation, deployment, and management

Developer Tools

AWS provides a full development toolchain:

• AWS CodeCommit: Managed Git repositories
• AWS CodeBuild: Managed build service for compiling code and running tests
• AWS CodeDeploy: Automated deployment to EC2, Lambda, and ECS
• AWS CodePipeline: CI/CD pipeline orchestration
• AWS Cloud9: Cloud-based IDE
• AWS X-Ray: Distributed tracing for debugging and performance analysis

Conclusion

The AWS service catalog is massive, and it grows every year. Don’t try to learn everything — focus on the services relevant to your role and use cases, then expand your knowledge outward. Start with compute, storage, networking, and security. Add databases and application integration as your architectures grow more complex. And keep this list handy as a reference for when you encounter a new requirement and need to know what’s available. The breadth of AWS is its greatest strength, and navigating it effectively is what separates good cloud engineers from great ones.