// Cloud / Mental Model / v1

AWS, mapped.

11 functional groups. ~70 services. Built for fast recall in interviews and real architecture decisions, not for marketing taxonomy.

11  categories
70+  services
 must-know
ComputeStorageDatabaseNetworkingSecurity & IAMDevOps & IaCObservabilityIntegrationAnalyticsAI / MLGovernance

Compute

01 / RUN CODE
  • EC2virtual machines
  • Lambdaserverless functions
  • ECSDocker orchestration
  • EKSmanaged Kubernetes
  • Fargateserverless containers
  • Batchbatch jobs
  • BeanstalkPaaS abstraction
  • Lightsailsimple VPS

Storage

02 / PUT BYTES
  • S3object store
  • EBSblock — EC2 disks
  • EFSNFS, shared FS
  • FSxWindows / Lustre
  • Glaciercold archive
  • Storage Gatewayhybrid bridge
  • Snowballoffline transfer

Database

03 / PERSIST STATE
  • RDSmanaged SQL
  • Auroracloud-native SQL
  • DynamoDBNoSQL key-value
  • ElastiCacheRedis / Memcached
  • Redshiftdata warehouse
  • DocumentDBMongo-compatible
  • Neptunegraph database
  • Timestreamtime-series

Networking

04 / MOVE PACKETS
  • VPCprivate network
  • SubnetsAZ segmentation
  • Route 53DNS & routing
  • CloudFrontglobal CDN
  • ALB / NLBload balancers
  • API GatewayREST / WS façade
  • Direct Connectprivate fiber
  • Transit GatewayVPC hub
  • PrivateLinkexpose services

Security & IAM

05 / GUARD GATES
  • IAMusers, roles, policies
  • KMSkey management
  • Secrets Managercredentials store
  • Cognitoend-user auth
  • ACMTLS certificates
  • WAFL7 firewall
  • ShieldDDoS defense
  • GuardDutythreat detection
  • Security Hubcentral posture

DevOps & IaC

06 / SHIP CODE
  • CloudFormationnative IaC
  • CDKIaC in code
  • Terraformmulti-cloud IaC
  • CodePipelineCI/CD orchestration
  • CodeBuildbuild runner
  • CodeDeploydeployment
  • CodeCommitgit hosting
  • ECRcontainer registry

Observability

07 / SEE TRUTH
  • CloudWatchmetrics + logs
  • X-Raydistributed tracing
  • CloudTrailAPI audit log
  • Configresource state
  • EventBridgeevent bus

Integration

08 / WIRE SYSTEMS
  • SQSmessage queue
  • SNSpub/sub topics
  • EventBridgeevent routing
  • Step Functionsworkflow orchestration
  • AppSyncmanaged GraphQL
  • Kinesisstream ingestion
  • MQRabbitMQ / ActiveMQ

Analytics

09 / QUERY DATA
  • AthenaSQL on S3
  • GlueETL + catalog
  • EMRSpark / Hadoop
  • QuickSightBI dashboards
  • Lake Formationdata lake setup
  • OpenSearchsearch + log analytics

AI / ML

10 / TRAIN MODELS
  • SageMakerML platform
  • Bedrockfoundation models
  • Rekognitionimage / video AI
  • ComprehendNLP service
  • Textractdocument OCR
  • Pollytext to speech
  • Translatelanguage translation

Governance

11 / OWN ACCOUNTS
  • Organizationsmulti-account tree
  • Control Towerlanding zone
  • Identity Centerfederated SSO
  • Systems Managerfleet operations
  • Trusted Advisorbest-practice scan
  • Cost Explorerbilling analysis