How AWS services are grouped
Want to build real architectures with these services? The AWS Cloud course in Kerala covers every service below in hands-on labs on your own AWS account.
Quick answer: AWS services fall into a few families: compute (EC2, Lambda, containers), storage (S3, EBS, EFS), databases (RDS, DynamoDB), networking (VPC, Route 53, CloudFront, load balancers), security and identity (IAM, KMS), management and monitoring (CloudWatch, CloudFormation, CloudTrail) and application integration (SNS, SQS). A beginner needs one or two from each family.
AWS runs these services in regions (Mumbai is ap-south-1, Hyderabad is ap-south-2) made up of availability zones, which are separate data centres. Most Indian companies host in Mumbai for latency and data residency. You pay for what you use, by the second, gigabyte or request, and most services below have a free tier generous enough for a learner to practise for months.
The list is ordered the way a beginner should learn it, not alphabetically. Each entry says what the service is, what it is typically used for, and whether you can practise it free.
Identity, compute and storage: the first four AWS services to learn
Quick answer: Start with IAM, EC2, S3 and VPC. Together they let you log in safely, run a server, store files and build a private network, which is the skeleton of every AWS architecture.
1. IAM (Identity and Access Management)
What it is: The service that controls who can do what in your account: users, groups, roles and policies written in JSON.
Typical use: Creating a least-privilege user instead of using the root account, giving an EC2 instance a role to read from S3, enforcing MFA.
Free tier: Always free.
2. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
What it is: Virtual servers (instances) you rent by the second, with your choice of CPU, memory, operating system and storage.
Typical use: Hosting a web application, running a batch job, a test environment, or anything you would otherwise run on a physical server.
Free tier: 750 hours a month of a t2.micro or t3.micro instance for 12 months.
3. S3 (Simple Storage Service)
What it is: Object storage: files of any size stored in buckets, with eleven nines of durability, versioning and lifecycle rules.
Typical use: Website images and backups, data lakes for analytics, static website hosting, log storage, sharing files between services.
Free tier: 5 GB standard storage for 12 months.
4. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
What it is: Your own isolated network inside AWS: subnets, route tables, internet and NAT gateways, security groups and network ACLs.
Typical use: Putting web servers in a public subnet and databases in a private subnet, connecting to an office network over VPN.
Free tier: Always free; NAT gateways and VPN connections are charged.
Databases, serverless and block storage
Quick answer: RDS gives you a managed SQL database, DynamoDB a managed NoSQL table, Lambda runs code without a server, and EBS is the disk attached to your EC2 instance.
5. RDS (Relational Database Service)
What it is: Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Aurora databases. AWS handles patching, backups and failover.
Typical use: The database behind a web or mobile app, reporting databases, replacing an on-premises SQL Server.
Free tier: 750 hours a month of db.t3.micro or db.t4g.micro for 12 months.
6. DynamoDB
What it is: A fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database with single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
Typical use: Session stores, shopping carts, IoT data, serverless application back-ends.
Free tier: 25 GB and 25 read and write capacity units, always free.
7. Lambda
What it is: Run a function in Python, Node.js, Java or other languages in response to an event, with no server to manage. You pay per request and per millisecond.
Typical use: Image resizing when a file lands in S3, scheduled jobs, REST API back-ends with API Gateway, glue between services.
Free tier: 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds a month, always free.
8. EBS (Elastic Block Store)
What it is: Persistent block storage volumes attached to EC2 instances, like a hard disk, with snapshots to S3.
Typical use: The root disk and data disks of a server; snapshots for backup.
Free tier: 30 GB of General Purpose SSD for 12 months.
You can see how these services are taught through full architectures on the Cokonet Academy website, and compare the AWS Cloud and DevOps tracks on our all courses page.
Networking and delivery: load balancing, DNS and CDN
Quick answer: Elastic Load Balancing spreads traffic across servers, Auto Scaling adds or removes servers with demand, Route 53 is DNS, and CloudFront caches content close to users worldwide.
9. ELB and Auto Scaling
What it is: Elastic Load Balancing (Application, Network and Gateway load balancers) distributes incoming traffic across healthy instances. Auto Scaling groups launch or terminate instances based on rules or metrics.
Typical use: A website that must stay up when one server fails and handle a festival sale without manual intervention.
Free tier: 750 hours of load balancer a month for 12 months; Auto Scaling itself is free.
10. Route 53
What it is: Amazon's DNS service: domain registration, hosted zones, health checks and routing policies such as latency and failover.
Typical use: Pointing yourdomain.com at a load balancer or CloudFront, routing Indian users to Mumbai and Gulf users to Bahrain.
Free tier: Charged per hosted zone and per million queries; small amounts.
11. CloudFront
What it is: A content delivery network with edge locations across India and the world that caches your content and terminates HTTPS.
Typical use: Faster image and video delivery, protecting an origin with WAF, serving a static S3 website globally.
Free tier: 1 TB of data transfer out and 10 million requests a month, always free.
Monitoring, messaging, infrastructure as code and containers
Quick answer: CloudWatch watches everything, SNS and SQS let services talk to each other, CloudFormation builds your infrastructure from a template, and ECS or EKS run containers.
12. CloudWatch
What it is: Metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for every AWS service and your own applications.
Typical use: An alarm when CPU stays above 80 percent, centralised application logs, a dashboard for the operations team.
Free tier: 10 custom metrics, 10 alarms and 5 GB of logs a month, always free.
13. SNS and SQS
What it is: SNS (Simple Notification Service) publishes messages to many subscribers: email, SMS, Lambda, HTTP. SQS (Simple Queue Service) holds messages in a queue until a consumer processes them.
Typical use: Alerting on-call staff, decoupling an order service from a billing service so a spike does not break either.
Free tier: 1 million SNS publishes and 1 million SQS requests a month, always free.
14. CloudFormation
What it is: Infrastructure as code: describe VPCs, servers, databases and permissions in a YAML or JSON template and let AWS create, update or delete them as a stack. Terraform is the common third-party alternative.
Typical use: Repeatable environments for dev, test and production; disaster recovery in another region.
Free tier: Free; you pay only for the resources created.
15. ECS and EKS
What it is: Container services. ECS (Elastic Container Service) runs Docker containers with AWS-native orchestration; EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) runs managed Kubernetes. Fargate runs containers for either without managing servers.
Typical use: Microservices, modern application platforms, lifting containerised apps from on-premises.
Free tier: ECS on EC2 is free apart from the instances; EKS charges a per-cluster fee.
Not sure whether to start with AWS Cloud or go straight to DevOps? Book a free consultation or call +91 8075 400 500 and a mentor will map the services above to the roles hiring in Kochi, Trivandrum and Bengaluru.
Other AWS services you will hear about
Quick answer: Beyond the fifteen, expect to meet CloudTrail (audit log of API calls), KMS (encryption keys), EFS (shared file storage), Elastic Beanstalk (deploy an app without managing infrastructure), API Gateway (front door for Lambda APIs), Glue and Athena (data analytics on S3), SageMaker and Bedrock (machine learning and generative AI), and Cost Explorer (billing analysis). You do not need these on day one.
A useful rule: when a job posting or exam question names a service you do not know, ask which family it belongs to. Most new AWS products are a managed version of something you already understand, and the console groups them the same way.
The order to learn AWS services and how to practise free
Quick answer: Week 1 IAM and billing alarms, weeks 2 and 3 EC2, EBS and S3, week 4 VPC, weeks 5 and 6 RDS, Lambda and DynamoDB, weeks 7 and 8 load balancing, Auto Scaling, Route 53 and CloudFront, then CloudWatch, SNS, SQS, CloudFormation and containers. Build one project per fortnight on a free-tier account.
Open an AWS account, turn on MFA, create an IAM user, and set a billing alarm at Rs 500 before anything else. Then build in this sequence: a static website on S3 and CloudFront; a WordPress or Node application on EC2 with RDS in a private subnet; a serverless image-resizing function with S3 and Lambda; a load-balanced, auto-scaling version of the EC2 application; and finally the same stack written as a CloudFormation template. Those five projects cover every service in this list and give you a portfolio for interviews.
Entry-level cloud roles in Kerala, cloud support engineer, junior cloud engineer, NOC engineer and AWS administrator, sit in public salary ranges of roughly Rs 3 to 5 lakh a year, with Bengaluru and remote roles higher. Our guides on the AWS certification path for beginners and AWS jobs in Kochi for freshers cover the exams and the hiring process.
Why Cokonet Academy for AWS training
Cokonet Academy is an NSDC partner training institute with campuses in Trivandrum and Kochi. Find us on Google: Cokonet Academy, Trivandrum and Cokonet Academy, Kochi.
- NSDC partner training institute with campuses in Trivandrum and Kochi, plus a Bengaluru centre and online-live batches
- 11,200+ successful placements and 50+ corporate hiring partners
- Expert trainers in SAP (FICO, MM, ABAP), AWS, Python with AI, Data Analytics and Power BI
- Placement support until you are hired, with mock interviews and resume reviews
The AWS Cloud Architect Program at Cokonet is mapped to the NSDC qualification SSC/Q8304 at NSQF Level 6 and prepares learners for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate path, with labs on live AWS accounts.
Course details
- Course: AWS Cloud Architect Program, Cokonet Academy
- Duration: 80 to 85 hours over about 4.5 months, 5 modules, 3 architecture projects
- Mode: classroom in Trivandrum, Kochi and Bengaluru, or online-live across Kerala and the Gulf; weekday evenings or weekends; English with Malayalam support
- Covers: IAM and account structure, VPC, EC2, S3, RDS, load balancing and Auto Scaling, Route 53 and CloudFront, Lambda and serverless, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, containers overview, Well-Architected Framework and certification prep
- Level: beginner friendly, no coding needed; NSDC SSC/Q8304, NSQF Level 6
- Placement: support until you are hired, with mock interviews and resume reviews
Syllabus, batch dates and trainer profiles: AWS Cloud course in Kerala. If you want CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform as well, see the DevOps on AWS course.
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Book a free consultation and sit in on a live session before you decide. We are open Monday to Saturday, 9:30am to 10:00pm.
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Learn the fifteen core AWS services by building with them. Join the AWS Cloud course, visit Cokonet Academy, or call and WhatsApp +91 8075 400 500.
