AWS Services by Category
Oct 17, 2026 · @niraj
AWS offers 200+ services; this list groups the ones you will actually meet into 18 categories, each with one line on what it is used for. A service that fits two categories appears once, where it is most often used. Services still running but closed to new customers are flagged in their row; services AWS has fully shut down are listed at the end. Lifecycle status is checked against AWS's own lifecycle pages.
Compute
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon EC2 | Rent resizable virtual servers (instances) by the second. |
| EC2 Auto Scaling | Add or remove EC2 instances automatically as load changes. |
| Amazon EC2 Image Builder | Build, patch and test machine images (AMIs) on a pipeline. |
| AWS Lambda | Run code on events without managing servers; pay per invocation. |
| AWS Elastic Beanstalk | Deploy a web app by uploading code; AWS provisions the stack. |
| Amazon Lightsail | Simple, flat-priced VPS, databases and load balancers for small sites. |
| AWS Batch | Run large batches of jobs on managed EC2/Fargate capacity. |
| AWS Outposts | AWS-managed racks/servers in your own data center. |
| AWS Local Zones | AWS compute placed in metro areas for single-digit-ms latency. |
| AWS Wavelength | AWS compute inside 5G carrier networks for mobile edge apps. |
| AWS ParallelCluster | Deploy and manage HPC clusters on AWS. |
| AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS) | Managed Slurm clusters for HPC workloads. |
| AWS Compute Optimizer | Recommends right-sized instances, volumes and Lambda settings. |
| VMware Cloud on AWS / Amazon EVS | Run VMware vSphere workloads on AWS bare-metal hosts. |
Containers
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon ECS | AWS's own orchestrator for running Docker containers. |
| Amazon EKS | Managed Kubernetes control plane (and optional managed nodes). |
| AWS Fargate | Serverless compute for ECS/EKS containers; no instances to manage. |
| Amazon ECR | Private and public registry for container images. |
| AWS App Runner | Deploy a container or source repo as a web service in one step. Closed to new customers since Apr 2026. |
| Amazon ECS Anywhere / EKS Anywhere | Run ECS or EKS on your own on-prem servers. |
| Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) | Managed OpenShift clusters on AWS. |
Serverless & Application Integration
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon SQS | Fully managed message queues to decouple services. |
| Amazon SNS | Pub/sub messaging and push notifications (SMS, email, mobile). |
| Amazon EventBridge | Event bus, scheduler and pipes routing events between AWS, SaaS and your apps. |
| AWS Step Functions | Orchestrate multi-step workflows as visual state machines. |
| Amazon MQ | Managed ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ brokers for existing apps. |
| Amazon API Gateway | Create, secure and publish REST, HTTP and WebSocket APIs. |
| AWS AppSync | Managed GraphQL APIs and real-time pub/sub. |
| Amazon MWAA | Managed Apache Airflow for scheduling data workflows. |
| Amazon AppFlow | No-code data flows between SaaS apps (Salesforce, etc.) and AWS. |
| AWS B2B Data Interchange | Translate and process EDI documents with trading partners. |
| AWS Serverless Application Repository | Discover and deploy prebuilt serverless apps. |
Storage
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | Object storage for any amount of data; the default data lake layer. |
| S3 Glacier storage classes | Low-cost archival tiers inside S3 (Instant, Flexible, Deep Archive). |
| Amazon S3 Tables / S3 Vectors | S3 buckets optimised for Apache Iceberg tables and for vector embeddings. |
| Amazon EBS | Block storage volumes attached to EC2 instances. |
| Amazon EFS | Elastic NFS file system shared across many instances. |
| Amazon FSx | Managed file systems: Windows, Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, OpenZFS. |
| Amazon File Cache | High-speed cache over on-prem or cloud file data for compute jobs. |
| AWS Storage Gateway | Connect on-prem apps to cloud storage via file, volume or tape. |
| AWS Backup | Centralised, policy-based backups across AWS services. |
| AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery | Continuous replication of servers for fast failover to AWS. |
Databases
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon RDS | Managed relational DBs: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, Db2. |
| Amazon Aurora | AWS's high-performance MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible database (incl. Serverless). |
| Amazon Aurora DSQL | Serverless, distributed PostgreSQL-compatible SQL with multi-Region active-active writes. |
| Amazon DynamoDB | Serverless key-value / document NoSQL with single-digit-ms latency. |
| Amazon ElastiCache | Managed in-memory cache: Valkey, Redis OSS, Memcached. |
| Amazon MemoryDB | Durable in-memory database (Valkey/Redis-compatible) for primary storage. |
| Amazon DocumentDB | MongoDB-compatible document database. |
| Amazon Keyspaces | Serverless Apache Cassandra-compatible database. |
| Amazon Neptune | Graph database for connected data (Gremlin, openCypher, SPARQL). |
| Amazon Timestream | Time-series database for IoT and metrics; new customers use Timestream for InfluxDB. |
| Oracle Database@AWS | Oracle Exadata databases running inside AWS data centers. |
Networking & Content Delivery
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon VPC | Your own isolated virtual network: subnets, route tables, gateways. |
| Elastic Load Balancing | Distribute traffic: Application, Network and Gateway Load Balancers. |
| Amazon CloudFront | Global CDN for caching and delivering content at the edge. |
| Amazon Route 53 | DNS, domain registration and health-check-based routing. |
| AWS Direct Connect | Dedicated private line from your data center to AWS. |
| AWS Site-to-Site VPN | Encrypted IPsec tunnels from on-prem networks to a VPC. |
| AWS Client VPN | Managed VPN for remote users to reach AWS/on-prem resources. |
| AWS Transit Gateway | Hub that connects many VPCs and on-prem networks. |
| AWS Cloud WAN | Build and manage a global WAN on the AWS backbone. |
| AWS PrivateLink | Private connectivity to services without exposing traffic to the internet. |
| Amazon VPC Lattice | Service-to-service networking, routing and auth across VPCs/accounts. |
| AWS Global Accelerator | Static anycast IPs that route users over the AWS backbone. |
| AWS Cloud Map | Service discovery registry for cloud resources. |
| AWS Verified Access | VPN-less, zero-trust access to corporate apps. |
Security, Identity & Compliance
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| AWS IAM | Users, roles and policies controlling who can do what in AWS. |
| AWS IAM Identity Center | Single sign-on across AWS accounts and business apps. |
| Amazon Cognito | Sign-up, sign-in and user directories for your web/mobile apps. |
| AWS Directory Service | Managed Microsoft Active Directory in AWS. |
| AWS Resource Access Manager | Share resources (subnets, etc.) across accounts. |
| Amazon Verified Permissions | Fine-grained app authorization using Cedar policies. |
| AWS KMS | Create and control encryption keys used across AWS. |
| AWS CloudHSM | Dedicated hardware security modules for keys you fully control. |
| AWS Secrets Manager | Store and auto-rotate passwords, API keys and DB credentials. |
| AWS Certificate Manager | Free public TLS certificates, auto-renewed; private CA option. |
| AWS Private CA | Run a managed private certificate authority. |
| AWS Payment Cryptography | Managed cryptography for card-payment processing. |
| AWS WAF | Web application firewall filtering HTTP requests (SQLi, XSS, bots). |
| AWS Shield | DDoS protection (Standard free; Advanced paid). |
| AWS Firewall Manager | Centrally manage WAF, Shield and firewall rules across accounts. |
| AWS Network Firewall | Managed stateful firewall and IPS for VPCs. |
| Amazon GuardDuty | Threat detection from logs, DNS and runtime activity. |
| Amazon Inspector | Scan EC2, containers and Lambda for vulnerabilities. |
| Amazon Macie | Discover and protect sensitive data (PII) in S3. |
| Amazon Detective | Investigate the root cause of security findings. |
| AWS Security Hub | Central dashboard of security findings and best-practice checks. |
| Amazon Security Lake | Centralise security logs in OCSF format in your account. |
| AWS Security Incident Response | Triage and respond to security incidents with AWS help. |
| AWS Audit Manager | Collect evidence for audits against frameworks (SOC 2, PCI). Closed to new customers since Apr 2026. |
| AWS Artifact | Download AWS compliance reports and agreements. |
| IAM Access Analyzer | Find unintended external or unused access in policies. |
Analytics
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon Athena | Run serverless SQL queries directly on data in S3. |
| Amazon Redshift | Petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse (provisioned or Serverless). |
| Amazon EMR | Managed Spark, Hive, Presto, Flink and Hadoop clusters (EC2, EKS or Serverless). |
| AWS Glue | Serverless ETL, data catalog and crawlers for preparing data. |
| AWS Glue DataBrew | Visual, no-code data cleaning and normalisation. |
| AWS Lake Formation | Build a governed data lake with fine-grained access control. |
| Amazon Kinesis Data Streams | Ingest and store real-time data streams for custom processing. |
| Amazon Data Firehose | Load streaming data into S3, Redshift, OpenSearch and others with no code. |
| Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink | Run Flink apps for real-time stream processing. |
| Amazon MSK | Managed Apache Kafka (provisioned or Serverless) plus Kafka Connect. |
| Amazon OpenSearch Service | Search, log analytics and vector search (Elasticsearch fork). |
| Amazon QuickSight (Quick Suite) | BI dashboards and natural-language Q&A over business data. |
| Amazon DataZone | Catalog, discover, share and govern data across an organisation. |
| Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio | One workspace for data, analytics and ML (next-gen SageMaker). |
| AWS Clean Rooms | Analyse combined datasets with partners without sharing raw data. |
| AWS Data Exchange | Find and subscribe to third-party datasets. |
| AWS Entity Resolution | Match and link related records (e.g., customer profiles). |
Machine Learning & Generative AI
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon Bedrock | API access to foundation models (Claude, Llama, Nova, etc.) plus guardrails and knowledge bases. |
| Amazon Bedrock AgentCore | Deploy and run AI agents securely at scale (runtime, memory, tools, identity). |
| Amazon Nova | Amazon's own family of foundation models (text, image, video, speech). |
| Amazon Q Developer | AI coding assistant for IDEs, CLI and the AWS console. IDE plugins end support Apr 2027. |
| Amazon Q Business | Generative-AI assistant over a company's internal data and apps. Closed to new customers since Jul 2026. |
| Kiro | AWS's agentic, spec-driven AI IDE. |
| Amazon SageMaker AI | Build, train, tune and deploy custom ML models. |
| SageMaker HyperPod | Resilient clusters for training large foundation models. |
| SageMaker JumpStart | Hub of pretrained models and ML solutions to deploy quickly. |
| SageMaker Canvas | No-code ML model building for business analysts. |
| Amazon Rekognition | Image and video analysis: objects, faces, text, moderation. |
| Amazon Textract | Extract text, forms and tables from scanned documents. |
| Amazon Comprehend | NLP: sentiment, entities, key phrases, PII detection. |
| Amazon Translate | Neural machine translation between languages. |
| Amazon Transcribe | Speech-to-text, including call analytics. |
| Amazon Polly | Text-to-speech with lifelike voices. |
| Amazon Lex | Build voice and text chatbots (the engine behind Alexa). |
| Amazon Kendra | Intelligent enterprise search over documents. Closed to new customers since Jul 2026. |
| Amazon Personalize | Real-time product and content recommendations. |
| Amazon Comprehend Medical | Extract medical information from clinical text. |
| AWS HealthScribe | Generate clinical notes from patient–clinician conversations. |
| Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) | Add human review steps to ML predictions. Closed to new customers since Jul 2026. |
| AWS Trainium / Inferentia | AWS-designed chips (EC2 Trn/Inf instances) for cheaper training and inference. |
Developer Tools
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| AWS CLI / SDKs | Command-line tool and language libraries for calling any AWS API. |
| AWS CDK | Define infrastructure in TypeScript, Python, Java, etc., compiled to CloudFormation. |
| AWS SAM | Framework and CLI for building and testing serverless apps. |
| AWS CodeBuild | Managed build service that compiles code and runs tests. |
| AWS CodeDeploy | Automate deployments to EC2, on-prem servers, Lambda and ECS. |
| AWS CodePipeline | CI/CD pipelines that chain source, build, test and deploy. |
| AWS CodeArtifact | Private package repository for npm, PyPI, Maven, NuGet. |
| Amazon CodeCatalyst | Unified dev workspace: repos, issues, CI/CD, dev environments. Closed to new customers since Nov 2025. |
| AWS X-Ray | Trace requests through distributed apps to find bottlenecks. |
| AWS Fault Injection Service | Run chaos-engineering experiments on AWS workloads. |
| AWS Infrastructure Composer | Visually design serverless architectures and generate IaC. Ends support Sep 2027. |
| AWS CloudShell | Browser-based shell with the AWS CLI preinstalled. |
| AWS Device Farm | Test apps on real phones, tablets and browsers. |
Management & Governance
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon CloudWatch | Metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for AWS resources and apps. |
| AWS CloudTrail | Record every API call made in your account for auditing. |
| AWS Config | Track resource configuration history and check compliance rules. |
| AWS CloudFormation | Provision AWS resources from JSON/YAML templates (infrastructure as code). |
| AWS Systems Manager | Operate fleets: patching, run commands, Session Manager, Parameter Store. |
| AWS Organizations | Manage many AWS accounts with consolidated billing and policies (SCPs). |
| AWS Control Tower | Set up and govern a secure multi-account landing zone. |
| AWS Service Catalog | Publish approved, pre-configured products for teams to launch. |
| AWS Trusted Advisor | Best-practice checks for cost, security, performance and limits. |
| AWS Well-Architected Tool | Review workloads against AWS's architecture best practices. |
| AWS Health | Alerts about AWS events and outages affecting your resources. |
| AWS Resilience Hub | Assess and improve app resilience against recovery targets. |
| AWS License Manager | Track and enforce software licence usage. |
| AWS Launch Wizard | Guided deployment of SAP, SQL Server and other enterprise apps. |
| AWS Resource Explorer | Search for resources across Regions and accounts. |
| AWS User Notifications | Central place to configure notifications from AWS services. |
| Amazon Managed Grafana | Managed Grafana dashboards for observability data. |
| Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus | Managed Prometheus for container metrics monitoring. |
| AWS Chatbot / Amazon Q in chat apps | Monitor and run AWS commands from Slack, Teams or Chime. |
| AWS Management Console | Web UI for managing every AWS service. |
Cloud Financial Management
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| AWS Cost Explorer | Visualise and analyse spend and usage over time. |
| AWS Budgets | Set cost or usage budgets with alerts and automated actions. |
| AWS Billing and Cost Management | Invoices, payments, cost allocation tags and the bill itself. |
| AWS Cost and Usage Reports / Data Exports | Detailed line-item billing data exported to S3 for analysis. |
| AWS Cost Anomaly Detection | ML alerts for unusual spikes in spend. |
| Savings Plans / Reserved Instances | Commit to usage for 1–3 years in exchange for big discounts. |
| AWS Pricing Calculator | Estimate the monthly cost of an architecture before building it. |
| AWS Billing Conductor | Custom billing views and rates (for resellers or chargeback). |
| AWS Marketplace | Buy and deploy third-party software billed through AWS. |
Migration & Transfer
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) | Lift-and-shift servers to EC2 with continuous replication. |
| AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) | Migrate and replicate databases, including across engines. |
| AWS Schema Conversion (in DMS) | Convert schemas and code between database engines. |
| AWS DataSync | Move large file/object datasets between on-prem and AWS storage, fast. |
| AWS Transfer Family | Managed SFTP, FTPS, FTP and AS2 endpoints backed by S3/EFS. |
| AWS Transform | AI agents that modernise .NET, mainframe and VMware workloads. |
| AWS Mainframe Modernization | Refactor or replatform mainframe apps to AWS. Closed to new customers since Nov 2025. |
| AWS Application Discovery Service | Inventory on-prem servers and dependencies to plan a migration. Closed to new customers since Nov 2025. |
| Migration Evaluator | Build a business case for moving to AWS. |
| AWS Data Transfer Terminal | Physical sites where you bring drives to upload data to AWS at high speed. |
Frontend Web & Mobile
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| AWS Amplify | Build, host and add backends (auth, data, storage) to web and mobile apps. |
| Amazon Location Service | Maps, geocoding, routing and geofencing for apps. |
| AWS End User Messaging | Send SMS, voice and push messages to users. |
| Amazon SES | Send transactional and marketing email at scale. |
Media Services
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| AWS Elemental MediaConvert | File-based video transcoding for broadcast and streaming. |
| AWS Elemental MediaLive | Encode live video streams for broadcast and OTT. |
| AWS Elemental MediaPackage | Package and protect video for delivery to any device. |
| AWS Elemental MediaConnect | Reliable, secure transport of live video into and across AWS. |
| AWS Elemental MediaTailor | Insert personalised ads and build linear channels in streams. |
| Amazon IVS | Low-latency live streaming and real-time video built into apps. |
| Amazon Kinesis Video Streams | Ingest and store video from cameras for analytics and ML. |
| AWS Deadline Cloud | Managed render farm for VFX and animation. |
Internet of Things
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| AWS IoT Core | Securely connect devices to the cloud over MQTT/HTTP and route their messages. |
| AWS IoT Greengrass | Run Lambda, containers and ML on edge devices, even offline. |
| AWS IoT Device Management | Onboard, organise, monitor and update device fleets remotely. |
| AWS IoT Device Defender | Audit and detect security issues across IoT devices. |
| AWS IoT SiteWise | Collect and analyse industrial equipment data. |
| AWS IoT TwinMaker | Build digital twins of real-world systems. |
| AWS IoT FleetWise | Collect and transfer vehicle data to the cloud. Closed to new customers since Apr 2026. |
| AWS IoT ExpressLink | Pre-certified connectivity modules for adding cloud links to devices. |
| FreeRTOS | Open-source real-time OS for microcontrollers. |
Business Applications & End-User Computing
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon Connect | Cloud contact center: voice, chat, routing and AI agents. |
| Amazon WorkSpaces | Virtual Windows/Linux desktops streamed to users. |
| Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser | Managed, isolated browser for accessing internal web apps. Closing to new customers (announced Sep 2026). |
| Amazon AppStream 2.0 | Stream desktop applications to a web browser. |
| Amazon WorkMail | Managed business email and calendars. Ends support Mar 2027. |
| AWS Wickr | End-to-end encrypted messaging and calls for enterprises. |
| AWS Supply Chain | Visibility and planning across inventory and suppliers. |
| AWS HealthLake | Store and analyse health data in FHIR format. |
| AWS HealthOmics | Store and process genomics and other omics data. |
| AWS HealthImaging | Store and serve medical images (DICOM) at scale. |
Specialty: Quantum, Satellite, Blockchain, Games, Communications
| Service | What it's used for |
|---|---|
| Amazon Braket | Run experiments on quantum computers and simulators. |
| AWS Ground Station | Control satellites and downlink satellite data as a service. |
| Amazon Managed Blockchain | Join or run Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric networks. Ends support Sep 2027. |
| Amazon GameLift Servers | Host and scale dedicated servers for multiplayer games. |
| Amazon GameLift Streams | Stream games to any browser or device. |
| Amazon Chime SDK | Add audio, video and messaging to your own apps. |