Chapter 1: Introduction to AWS

Chapter 1: Introduction to AWS



The above AWS product map was from here and is not up to date.

The 1st chapter of the Solutions Architect book is really just an introduction.

A couple of observations/questions:

There are a large number of Amazon Web Services (and they are growing every year). How many are there now? How can you keep track of them all? Some of them have cryptic names? How can you easily recall what they actually do? E.g. Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Route 53, Glacier, CloudFront, DynamoDB (ok, it's some sort of DB), Redshift, CloudX, etc.

What is most useful at a high level is the categories available (18 categories here):


  1. Compute (9)
  2. Storage (8)
  3. Database (6)
  4. Migration (6)
  5. Network and Content Delivery (5)
  6. Developer Tools (6)
  7. Management Tools (9)
  8. Security, Identify and Compliance (10)
  9. Analytics (9)
  10. Artificial Intelligence (4)
  11. Mobile Services (6)
  12. Application Services (3)
  13. Messaging (4)
  14. Business Productivity (3)
  15. Desktop and App Streaming (2)
  16. Internet of Things (3)
  17. Contact Center (1)
  18. Game Development (2)
If you add them all up this gives 96 current services.
However, the number of permutations is, err, "lots".
I've seen a graph of number of AWS per year at AWS summits which is also worrying as the growth trend is probably not linear.

How do you know which services are actually (formally) and sensibly (do something useful) interoperable? Is this defined anywhere?

Most of the services have limitations and costs. How can you best architect a complex systems of AWS and be able to determine in advance if it will work taking into account interoperability, limitations, and cost?

However, without some automagical way of checking if your requirements exceed any limits, or checking if limitations of combined services (e.g. service consumer and producer limits are compatible) are satisfied this looks tricky.


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