AWS Service Categories Explained

Making Sense of the AWS Universe

With over 200 services, the AWS ecosystem can feel overwhelming. To bring order to this complexity, AWS groups its services into categories based on their function. Understanding these categories is the first step toward building a mental map of what's possible in the cloud.

The Core Pillars

Most AWS architectures are built upon a foundation of a few key service categories:

Compute: These services are the "brains" of your application, responsible for running code. This category includes everything from Amazon EC2 (virtual machines) and AWS Lambda (serverless functions) to container services like Amazon ECS and EKS.
Storage: Every application needs to store data. AWS provides a range of storage options, including Amazon S3 for scalable object storage, Amazon EBS for block storage attached to EC2 instances, and Amazon EFS for shared file systems.
Databases: AWS offers databases for every conceivable use case. This category includes relational databases like Amazon RDS, NoSQL databases like Amazon DynamoDB, in-memory caches like ElastiCache, and data warehouses like Amazon Redshift.
Networking & Content Delivery: These services connect your resources to each other and to your users. Amazon VPC lets you create your own private network, while Amazon Route 53 handles DNS, and Amazon CloudFront speeds up content delivery globally.

Exploring Further

Beyond these core pillars, you'll find specialized categories for:

Machine Learning (e.g., SageMaker, Comprehend)
Analytics (e.g., Athena, Kinesis)
Security, Identity, & Compliance (e.g., IAM, KMS)
Developer Tools (e.g., CodeCommit, CodePipeline)

Using the category filter on AWS Icon Scout is a great way to explore all the services within a specific domain and see how they fit together.