Chapter One

Compute

Eight services on the spectrum from full infrastructure control to fully managed execution. The right choice depends on your workload, your team's expertise, and how much operational overhead you are prepared to take on.

8 services

AWS Compute — From Raw VMs to Functions

EC2

Raw virtual machines. You pick the AMI, instance type, disk, and network.

EKS / ECS

Managed orchestration. You manage tasks, services, and deployments.

Fargate

Serverless containers. No nodes to patch — you still build the image.

Beanstalk

Managed PaaS. Push code; AWS provisions and scales the stack.

Lambda

Event-driven functions. AWS runs your code per request; nothing when idle.

More controlLess ops

You manage the OS, patches, scaling.AWS manages everything except your code.

Core Terminology

A handful of terms appear throughout this guide. Defining them here keeps the service-level chapters focused on what matters.

Region

A geographic location such as us-east-1 or eu-west-1. Each Region is fully isolated; it affects latency, data-residency compliance, service availability, and pricing.

Availability Zone

One or more isolated data centers within a Region, with independent power and networking. Spreading across AZs is how you survive a single-facility failure.

Instance Type

A named hardware profile (such as m5.large) defining vCPUs, memory, and network capacity. Families target general-purpose, compute, memory, or accelerated workloads.

AMI

Amazon Machine Image — the template (OS, packages, configuration) an EC2 instance boots from.

IAM Role

An identity with permissions that workloads assume to call AWS APIs — the alternative to embedding long-lived access keys.

Security Group

A stateful virtual firewall attached to an instance or network interface, controlling inbound and outbound traffic by port, protocol, and source.