The 5 AWS services I use the most

Amazon's web services are extraordinary: they manage to both simplify very complex tasks, but also complicate simple tasks...

If you've ever tried to find out how much your AWS services are costing you, you know what I mean...

Nevertheless, there exists, in my opinion, a handful of tools that tip the scales in Amazon's favor and that I've been using daily for years. These are simple tools, most of the time affordable (watch out for EC2 though) and that can make your life easier, especially if you're not very used to deployment.

1 – Amazon EC2

Elastic Compute Cloud

This is more or less the equivalent of a VPS at Amazon. The difference with a more "classic" VPS is that there are a huge number of different pricing options and possible configurations.

Note that you pay for usage, so if you stop the instance, it will no longer cost you anything. If you're looking for a more classic VPS experience, it seems to me that AWS Lightsail is made for that.

2 – Amazon S3

Simple Static Storage

As its name suggests, Amazon S3 is a static file storage system (upload, download but no execution). Basic usage allows, for example, storing an application's resources (images, videos, json, xml,...) and being able to query them via a URL generated by S3.

But one of the most interesting features is the ability to use the "bucket" as a static website hosting (or the front end of a web application).

You just need to upload your files, enable web hosting and that's it, you can access your site thanks to the provided url!

3 – Amazon Cloudfront

Cloudfront is a CDN in Amazon's style: you just need to enter the URL (or the bucket) from which it should deliver files, a few optional configurations and that's it.

You can choose the paths of files to invalidate during your updates, or you can let your deployment scripts do the work for you.

The real advantages of Cloudfront are the ability to assign one or more domain names to the cdn, to redirect requests from http to https, but above all, ABOVE ALL, to easily enable SSL for free thanks to the Amazon ACM service.

4 – Amazon Certificate Manager

This service lets you generate an SSL certificate (to switch your domain to https) for free by simply adding a line to your DNS configuration.

Certificate validation happens in less than 2 minutes, and if you use Amazon's DNS servers, it only takes a single click and everything is automated!

5 – Route 53

This is Amazon's DNS configuration service. There are two ways to use it:

• Either you assign the nameservers provided by Amazon to your domain name reserved with another registrar
• Or you reserve your domain name directly through Route53

Then your configuration works just like any other DNS manager!