AWS Compute Services

Compute is where your applications actually run, so this topic sits at the center of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course. It covers the main ways to run a workload on AWS, from full virtual servers you control yourself to serverless code that AWS runs for you only when an event fires.

One idea runs through every lesson: the more AWS manages, the less you do. Amazon EC2 gives you the most control and the most responsibility, containers sit in the middle, and serverless options like Lambda and Fargate hand the servers to AWS. The topic ends with the tools that keep an application available and right-sized as traffic changes.

What This Topic Covers

• Amazon EC2 virtual servers, the parts of an instance, and how to read an instance type name
• the five EC2 instance type families and the workloads each one suits
• containers and how Amazon ECR, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EKS work together
• serverless compute with AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, and when to choose each
• Elastic Load Balancing and the Application, Network, and Gateway load balancer types
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and how load balancing and scaling work as a pair

Why It Matters

Cloud Technology and Services is the largest domain on the exam, and compute is a big part of it. Many questions describe a workload and ask which option fits, so you need to tell EC2, containers, Lambda, and Fargate apart and know the tradeoff each one makes between control and operational work.

These services also connect to the rest of the course. Instance types feed into pricing, the shared responsibility model shifts as you move from EC2 to serverless, and load balancing with Auto Scaling is the standard answer to questions about high availability and elasticity. Get compute right and a large group of exam scenarios becomes much easier to read.