The easiest way to understand cloud infrastructure is to stop starting with service names. Start with jobs the system must do.
The six jobs
- Identity: who or what is allowed to do something.
- Networking: what can talk to what.
- Compute: where code runs.
- Storage: where files, records, and state live.
- Monitoring: how you know what happened.
- Cost: how usage turns into money.
Why beginners get stuck
Most beginners meet AWS as a long list of names: IAM, EC2, S3, Lambda, VPC, CloudWatch. That feels random until each service has a category. IAM belongs to identity. VPC belongs to networking. EC2 and Lambda belong to compute. S3 belongs to storage. CloudWatch belongs to monitoring.
Study prompt
Draw six boxes: identity, networking, compute, storage, monitoring, and cost. Put one AWS service under each box. If a service does not fit yet, that is your next study target.