The rooms AWS runs for you

One giant machine cut into slices you can rent, and the key you use to get into yours. This lesson is about everything you would otherwise do once you are inside, and the rooms where the harbour does it for you.

Before you start. EC2 & Instances - what you are actually renting gave you the instance: a slice of a big shared computer that you rent by the hour, where the operating system, the software and every chore on it are yours to run. Object Storage and the CDN gave you a first taste of the other kind of rent, a storage bucket where you never see a disk at all, and IAM & Identity gave you the rule that every action in AWS is checked against a written list of who may do what.

The idea in 30 seconds

A managed service is something AWS runs on its own machines, used through requests, where you never hold the key to the machine underneath.
A managed service moves the line between your chores and AWS’s; you still own your data, your code, who may touch them, and the bill.
RDS is a database AWS copies, patches and fails over for you; its standby copy repeats every change, a mistaken delete included.
A queue holds work until a worker takes it, and hides a taken message instead of deleting it, so a worker that crashes loses nothing.
Lambda runs your code only while an event needs it, for at most 15 minutes a run; Fargate runs a long-lived container without you running the machine.
Choose among them by how long the work runs and how much of the machine you need to touch.

Read the story · Skip to the numbers