AWS
The largest cloud. Every primitive you'll ever need, plus a punishing bill if you're not careful.
Mindmap
The plain-English version
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud provider, with hundreds of services. EC2 (virtual machines), S3 (object storage), RDS (managed databases), Lambda (serverless functions), VPC (networking), IAM (permissions), and on and on. Most of the modern internet runs on it directly or indirectly.
The problem it solves
You'll meet AWS one of two ways: directly (running your infrastructure on it), or indirectly (Vercel, Render, Fly all run on AWS or other clouds). The fluency to read AWS docs and reason about regions, availability zones, IAM, and the security model pays back — even if you never log into the console.
Alternatives
| Alternative | Type | When it wins |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | platform | Cloudflare's static + functions hosting. Built on Workers. Fast global CDN, fair pricing, generous free tier. |
| Vercel | platform | The Next.js platform of record. Tightest integration with Next, expensive at scale, fastest dev iteration. |
Deep links
The words you'll hear
- Region / Availability Zone
- Geographic region (us-east-1) / isolated datacenter within it (us-east-1a). Multi-AZ = redundancy.
- EC2 / RDS / S3 / Lambda
- Compute (VM) / managed database / object storage / serverless functions. The big four.
- IAM
- Identity and Access Management. Policies attached to users and roles.
- VPC / Subnet / Security Group
- Virtual network / its divisions / instance-level firewalls.
- CloudFormation / CDK
- AWS-native IaC. CDK is the modern programming-language version.
- CloudWatch
- Logs and metrics.
- ECS / EKS / Fargate
- Container services. ECS = AWS's own; EKS = managed Kubernetes; Fargate = serverless containers.
Bad vs. good prompt for AWS
Why it works: Asks for the architecture sketch (the most useful artifact for a non-expert), names every component including the secrets and observability pieces, and limits to the high level so it's reviewable.
What bites real teams
AWS IAM is comprehensive and confusing. Start with managed policies; don't write custom JSON until you have to.
Data leaving AWS costs money. Cross-region, internet egress, NAT gateway. Monitor.
AWS has multiple services that do nearly the same thing (Cognito vs Auth.js + RDS, ECS vs EKS, etc.). Consult the service comparison docs before committing.