Core services and additional services

AWS consists of many cloud services that you can use in combinations tailored to your organizational needs. To access the services, you can use the AWS Management Console (a simple intuitive user interface), the Command Line Interface (CLI), or Software Development Kits (SDKs).

For more information, see the Overview of Amazon Web Services whitepaper.

Core services

Core cloud capabilities are those that most applications will require simply to run. Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications. These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. Compute, storage and networking are core and critical to just about every application – old and new. Most customers should look to these first to get an application up and running on AWS. AWS is a platform that offers both core cloud capabilities and the services that enable them to evolve as they move along their cloud journey.

AWS provides building blocks that you can assemble quickly to support virtually any workload. With AWS, you’ll find a complete set of highly available services that are designed to work together to build sophisticated scalable applications. You have access to highly durable storage, low-cost compute, high-performance databases, management tools, and more. All this is available without up-front cost, and you pay for only what you use. These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. AWS is trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest start-ups to power a wide variety of workloads, including web and mobile applications, game development, data processing and warehousing, storage, archive, and many others. With so many capabilities, the key for AWS and customers is in understanding where such breadth has value and where depth in capability is important.

Additional services

The second group of services are those that customers may choose to use depending on their requirements. Many customers want to experience some of the basic capabilities of such products and services to experiment and test new solutions.

By offering such a broad scope of advanced solutions, from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to internet of things (IoT), networking, and content delivery, AWS makes it easy for customers to evolve and experiment. But sometimes, customers need additional support to leverage new technologies (see the AWS Professional Services section). More importantly, they do so without having to go outside of the familiarity and existing contractual relationship that the organization has with AWS, for all (at the time of this publication) 176 services. This is where breadth has greater value over depth. We are not just talking about customers adding new features to solutions, any of the capabilities of AWS help organizations with their entire application lifecycle. For example, AWS supports multiple technology stacks – just about any technology stack – and this is very powerful.

The benefit is that the flexibility of AWS means these third-party tools can be used with applications running on AWS.