Amazon Web Services
Compute, storage, networking, databases, serverless, containers, IAM, and observability
Core Compute — EC2 & Auto Scaling
Rent virtual servers on demand and scale them horizontally behind a load balancer.
Object Storage — Amazon S3
Store unlimited objects durably and cheaply, with tiered classes and fine-grained access.
Networking — VPC, Subnets & Security Groups
Carve out a private, isolated network and control exactly what can reach each resource.
Managed Databases — RDS, Aurora & DynamoDB
Offload database operations: pick relational (RDS/Aurora) or serverless NoSQL (DynamoDB).
Serverless — AWS Lambda
Run code in response to events without provisioning or managing any servers.
Containers — ECS, EKS & Fargate
Run containers as managed services, with or without managing the underlying servers.
Identity & Access — IAM
Grant least-privilege permissions to users, services, and workloads via policies and roles.
Observability — CloudWatch & X-Ray
Collect metrics, logs, and traces to monitor health, alert on problems, and debug distributed systems.
Messaging & Events — SQS, SNS & EventBridge
Decouple services with queues, fan-out topics and an event bus, and know which one an interviewer wants.
API Gateway — Managed HTTP Front Door
Put a managed API layer in front of Lambda or containers, with auth, throttling and validation handled before your code runs.
Content Delivery — CloudFront & Edge Caching
Serve content from locations near the user, cut origin load, and know what is cacheable and what is not.
DNS & Traffic Routing — Route 53
Resolve names to endpoints and shift traffic between regions using routing policies and health checks.
Load Balancing — ALB, NLB & Gateway Load Balancer
Spread traffic across targets and know which balancer suits which protocol and failure mode.
Caching — ElastiCache for Redis & Memcached
Put a managed in-memory cache in front of a database, and handle invalidation and failure properly.
Streaming — Kinesis Data Streams & Firehose
Ingest high-volume ordered event streams and know when a stream beats a queue.
Orchestration — AWS Step Functions
Coordinate a multi-step workflow with retries, branching and compensation, without writing the state machine yourself.
Block & File Storage — EBS & EFS
Choose between block, file and object storage, and size an EBS volume for the IOPS it actually needs.
Encryption & Secrets — KMS, Secrets Manager & Parameter Store
Encrypt data at rest with managed keys and keep credentials out of code, environment variables and git.
Infrastructure as Code — CloudFormation, CDK & Terraform
Define infrastructure in version control so environments are reproducible and changes are reviewable.
CI/CD — CodePipeline, CodeBuild & CodeDeploy
Build, test and release automatically, with a deployment strategy that can be rolled back.
DynamoDB Data Modelling — Keys, Indexes & Capacity
Design partition keys and indexes for access patterns, and avoid the hot partition that caps throughput.
Resilience & Disaster Recovery — Multi-AZ and Multi-Region
Design for failure with a stated RTO and RPO, and pick a DR strategy that matches what the business will pay for.
Cost Optimisation & the Well-Architected Framework
Cut spend without cutting capability, and know the six pillars an architecture review is scored against.
Account Security — Organizations, SCPs, WAF & GuardDuty
Separate workloads across accounts, set guardrails nobody can escape, and detect what IAM cannot prevent.