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AWS has data centers everywhere. A handful of services help you actually use them — to route users to the right place, speed up the trip, or bring AWS closer to where the trip ends. The mental map ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ ROUTE traffic globally │ │ • Route 53 (DNS — where to send users) │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ CACHE / ACCELERATE content │ │ • CloudFront (CDN — cache at edge) │ │ • S3 Transfer Accel (faster uploads to S3) │ │ • Global Accelerator (faster routes, no cache) │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ EXTEND AWS to other places │ │ • Outposts (AWS racks in your data center) │ │ • WaveLength (AWS in 5G telecom datacenters) │ │ • Local Zones (AWS in metro areas near users) │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Route 53 — global DNS Route 53 translates myapp....

Once you understand the building blocks of AWS, the next question is practical: how do you get an app onto AWS, and how do you manage it afterward? Five services cover this, and they group neatly by the job they do. The mental map ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ DEFINE infrastructure as code │ │ • CloudFormation (YAML/JSON templates) │ │ • CDK (real code → compiles to CFN) │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ DEPLOY applications │ │ • Elastic Beanstalk (PaaS, all-in-one) │ │ • CodeDeploy (push code to existing fleet) │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ MANAGE running infrastructure │ │ • Systems Manager (SSM) │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ CloudFormation CloudFormation is declarative AWS infrastructure as code....

Both AWS Batch and Lambda run your code without making you manage servers — but they are built for very different shapes of work. Knowing which is which saves you from forcing a long job into a service that caps out at 15 minutes. The core difference Lambda Batch Built for Short, event-driven tasks Long, heavy batch jobs Execution time ≤ 15 min Hours or days — no limit Trigger Events (S3, API, schedule) Job submission Resources Up to 10 GB RAM Any EC2/Fargate size, including GPUs Runs on Lambda’s managed runtime EC2 or Fargate (you don’t manage them, but they exist) Scaling Instant, per invocation Queues jobs, then provisions compute Use case Glue code, reactions, APIs Data processing, ML training, simulations Mental model Lambda: "Run this small function NOW, fast....

Serverless is a shift in how you think about compute: instead of provisioning and running servers, you just deploy code. AWS Lambda is the service that pioneered it, and it is the third compute option in the AWS model — alongside EC2 and Fargate. What serverless means A new paradigm — developers don’t manage servers, they just deploy code (functions). It started as FaaS (Function as a Service), pioneered by AWS Lambda....

If your app is packaged as a Docker container, AWS gives you three services that work together to run it: ECS to orchestrate containers, Fargate to run them without managing servers, and ECR to store the images. ECS — Elastic Container Service ECS launches Docker containers on AWS. The key thing about it: you provision and maintain the EC2 instances — the infrastructure — and AWS handles starting and stopping containers across those EC2s....