AWS — Services & Pricing
Amazon Web Services is the broadest and most mature of the three majors — the widest service catalog, the deepest set of primitives, and the largest partner/marketplace ecosystem. Its design center is composable building blocks: you assemble fine-grained services (S3, EC2, Lambda, SQS, IAM) rather than adopt opinionated end-to-end stacks. That breadth is its strength and its tax — maximum flexibility, but more pieces to wire and govern.
This page localizes the reference architecture to AWS: CloudFront → API Gateway / ALB → EC2 · EKS · Lambda → RDS / DynamoDB / ElastiCache / S3 → Redshift · Kinesis · SageMaker, with IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, and CloudFormation cross-cutting.
Services by capability
Section titled “Services by capability”| Capability | Service | What it is | Unit price | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object Storage | S3 Standard | Durable object storage for unstructured data; standard tier for frequently accessed objects. | $0.023/GB-month | live |
| Block Storage (SSD volume) | EBS gp3 | General-purpose SSD block volume for EC2; baseline IOPS/throughput included. | $0.08/GB-month | live |
| VM Compute (general purpose, ~2 vCPU / 8 GB) | EC2 m5.large (2 vCPU) | General-purpose on-demand VM, 2 vCPU / 8 GB; price normalized per vCPU-hour. | $0.048/vCPU-hour | live |
| Serverless Functions / Edge Compute | Lambda | Event-driven functions; first 1M requests/mo free, then per-request. | $0.2/1M requests | list |
| Managed Relational DB (PostgreSQL, ~2 vCPU / 8 GB) | RDS PostgreSQL db.m5.large | Managed PostgreSQL, 2 vCPU / 8 GB, single-AZ on-demand (instance only). | $0.178/instance-hour | list |
| Internet Data Egress | EC2/S3 egress | Internet data transfer out; first 100 GB/mo free, then per-GB. | $0.09/GB | list |
| CDN (content delivery egress) | CloudFront | CDN cache egress (NA/EU first tier). | $0.085/GB | list |
| Managed Kubernetes (control plane) | EKS | Managed Kubernetes control plane (per-cluster fee; nodes billed separately). | $0.1/cluster-hour | list |
Core building blocks
Section titled “Core building blocks”- Compute — EC2 for VMs (deepest instance-family selection of any cloud), Lambda for event-driven serverless, ECS/Fargate for containers without cluster ops, EKS for managed Kubernetes. Spot and Savings Plans are the primary cost levers.
- Storage — S3 is the de-facto object-storage standard (durability, lifecycle tiering, event triggers); EBS for block volumes, EFS/FSx for shared file systems.
- Data — RDS/Aurora (Aurora is AWS’s high-performance MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible engine), DynamoDB for serverless NoSQL at scale, Redshift for warehousing, ElastiCache for Redis.
- Integration & events — SQS/SNS/EventBridge and Step Functions for decoupled, event-driven architectures — an area where AWS’s primitives are especially rich.
- AI/ML — SageMaker for the full ML lifecycle; Bedrock for managed foundation models.
- Governance — IAM (the most granular permission model of the three), KMS, CloudWatch, CloudFormation/CDK for infrastructure-as-code.
When to choose AWS
Section titled “When to choose AWS”- You want maximum breadth and the richest primitives — niche services, the most instance types, the deepest event/integration toolkit.
- Largest talent pool and ecosystem — most third-party tools, SDKs, and certified engineers target AWS first.
- Serverless-first or event-driven designs — Lambda + EventBridge + Step Functions is a mature, well-trodden pattern.
- Lean toward elsewhere when: you want lower-friction, more opinionated managed stacks (GCP’s data/AI; Azure’s enterprise-Microsoft integration), a simpler bill, or you’re optimizing egress-heavy workloads (see Cloudflare’s $0 egress). AWS’s flexibility means more services to configure and a more complex cost surface.
Cost note: the table above is the first-tier on-demand list/live price per capability. AWS’s real-world economics shift substantially with Savings Plans / Reserved Instances (compute) and S3 tiering — model those for committed workloads.
Pricing generated from the live cost catalog via scripts/gen_cloud_docs.py.