Understanding AWS Service Categories

The AWS Ecosystem

The AWS cloud offers over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. To make sense of this vast portfolio, AWS groups its services into categories. Understanding these categories is the first step to building a mental model of what's possible on AWS.

Core Categories

Here are some of the most common categories you'll encounter:

• Compute: This is where you'll find services that run your code. It includes services like Amazon EC2 (virtual servers), AWS Lambda (serverless functions), and Amazon ECS (containers).
• Storage: These services are all about storing your data. The most famous is Amazon S3 (object storage), but it also includes Amazon EBS (block storage for EC2) and Amazon EFS (file storage).
• Database: AWS offers a wide range of databases to fit any need. This includes Amazon RDS (relational databases), Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL), and Amazon Redshift (data warehousing).
• Networking & Content Delivery: These services connect your resources and deliver content to your users. Key services include Amazon VPC (your private network in the cloud) and Amazon CloudFront (CDN).

Use our category filter to explore all the services within a specific domain.