Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is the default choice when you need the broadest selection of managed services — over 200 at last count — and do not have an existing enterprise commitment to Microsoft or Google. AWS leads in compute diversity (EC2 has more instance types than any competitor), offers the most mature serverless ecosystem (Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge, DynamoDB), and has the largest global infrastructure with 34 regions and 108 availability zones as of early 2026. Azure is stronger when your organization is deeply invested in Microsoft 365, Entra ID, or .NET, because the native integration reduces friction. Google Cloud excels in data analytics (BigQuery), machine learning (Vertex AI), and Kubernetes (GKE originated the project). If your team has no strong platform dependency and wants the safest bet for long-term service availability and community support, AWS is the pragmatic starting point.

AWS uses a pay-as-you-go model with separate meters for compute hours, storage volume, data transfer, and API requests — which means costs can surprise you if architecture decisions are made without pricing awareness. The biggest cost levers are: Reserved Instances or Savings Plans (committing to 1–3 years of usage cuts compute costs by 30–60 %); right-sizing instances using Compute Optimizer recommendations; scheduling non-production environments to shut down outside business hours; and monitoring NAT Gateway data transfer, which is a common hidden expense in VPC architectures. Spot Instances save up to 90 % for fault-tolerant batch workloads. We set up AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection alerts on every account, tag all resources for cost attribution, and review spend weekly during the first months. In our experience, a well-optimized AWS environment costs 25–40 % less than a naively provisioned one running the same workload.

AWS handles virtually any workload, but it excels in several scenarios. SaaS platforms benefit from ECS Fargate or EKS for auto-scaling containers, Aurora for managed PostgreSQL/MySQL with read replicas, and CloudFront for global CDN delivery. Serverless event-driven applications thrive on Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and Step Functions — perfect for startups that want zero infrastructure management and true pay-per-invocation pricing. Media-heavy products leverage S3 for storage, MediaConvert for transcoding, and CloudFront for edge delivery. Data engineering pipelines combine Kinesis for real-time ingestion, Glue for ETL, Athena for ad-hoc queries, and Redshift for data warehousing. Machine learning projects use SageMaker for model training and inference endpoints. Regulated industries rely on AWS's SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and FedRAMP certifications. If your product touches any of these patterns, AWS has a battle-tested service for it.

AWS provides security at every layer, but it operates under a shared responsibility model — AWS secures the infrastructure, you secure your configuration and data. We implement defense-in-depth: VPCs with private subnets for compute and databases, security groups scoped to minimum required ports, and no public IP addresses on backend services. IAM policies follow the principle of least privilege, with separate roles for each service and no long-lived access keys — EC2 instances and Lambda functions assume roles via instance profiles or execution roles. Secrets are stored in AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation. Data at rest is encrypted with KMS-managed keys, and data in transit uses TLS 1.3. AWS Config and GuardDuty provide continuous compliance monitoring and threat detection. For regulated industries, AWS maintains over 140 compliance certifications including SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI DSS Level 1, and ISO 27001, but achieving compliance for your application still requires correct configuration — which is where our infrastructure expertise comes in.

The AWS DevOps ecosystem in 2026 is anchored by Terraform and AWS CDK as the two dominant infrastructure-as-code approaches. Terraform, backed by OpenTofu as an open-source fork, remains the most portable option — teams use it to manage AWS alongside other providers in a single codebase. AWS CDK in TypeScript has grown rapidly among teams that prefer writing infrastructure in a general-purpose language and want tight integration with CloudFormation. For CI/CD, GitHub Actions with OIDC role assumption has overtaken CodePipeline in popularity for most teams, while CodeBuild remains useful for builds that need VPC connectivity. Container orchestration has consolidated around ECS Fargate for simpler workloads and EKS for teams that need full Kubernetes compatibility. Monitoring combines CloudWatch for native metrics, Prometheus and Grafana for container workloads, and OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing. AWS App Runner has matured into a viable option for simple web services that do not need fine-grained infrastructure control.