AWS Cheat Sheet

This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official documentation before being relied on in production.

See the section bibliography for the reference material consulted while preparing these pages.

A single-page index of quick back-links to every page in this section, grouped the same way as the section itself — handy for jumping straight to the topic you need instead of paging through the full navigation. The section overview is AWS (Amazon Web Services).

The downloadable PDF is a separate, single A4 page meant for printing. It states the version baseline this section targets (AWS CLI 2.37, CDK CLI 2.1143, SAM CLI 1.166 and Kubernetes 1.36 on EKS) and covers:

  • the account and identity hierarchy (organization, organizational unit, account, IAM Identity Center), Regions and Availability Zones, plus the core aws CLI essentials (configure sso, sso login, login, --query / --output, profiles);

  • the compute decision table across EC2, Lightsail, ECS Express Mode, ECS on Fargate, Lambda, EKS and App Runner, with the matching ECS and Fargate commands (task and execution roles, services, deployments), Lambda commands (functions, aliases, concurrency), ECR push and scan commands, and EKS create, access and upgrade commands (Auto Mode, access entries, Pod Identity, Gateway API);

  • S3 (storage classes, Block Public Access, presigned URLs, lifecycle, static hosting) and CloudFront (origin access control, cache policies, invalidation);

  • database create commands for RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, OpenSearch and ElastiCache, IAM authentication and managed master passwords, and an engine-to-AWS-option map;

  • Secrets Manager, Parameter Store and KMS (create, rotate, reference syntax) and AppConfig (profiles, deployments, the Kubernetes ConfigMap pattern);

  • networking essentials (VPC, subnets, gateways, security groups, endpoints), the load balancer decision tree, API Gateway types and key settings, and Client VPN and Site-to-Site VPN;

  • email with SES (identities, DKIM, sandbox exit, sending), monitoring (CloudWatch, Logs Insights, OpenTelemetry) and cost management (budgets, Cost Explorer, support plans); and

  • a retirements-and-renames strip with dates for services and versions being phased out.

Foundations — Cloud Concepts, Getting Started with AWS, AWS Global Infrastructure, Accounts and Organizations, Identity and Access, and Infrastructure as Code.

Compute — Choosing a Compute Service, Amazon EC2 and Auto Scaling, Container Registry, ECS and Fargate, ECS Deployments, Scaling and Networking, AWS Lambda, Lambda: Event-Driven and Serverless Apps, EKS Clusters, and Deploying Microservices on EKS.

Storage and CDN — Block and File Storage on AWS, S3 Object Storage, S3 Security and Static Hosting, and CloudFront and CDN Delivery.

Managed databases — Managed Databases on AWS, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, DocumentDB and MongoDB on AWS, OpenSearch and Search on AWS, and Caching, Graph and Partner Databases.

Security and runtime configuration — Secrets Manager, Parameter Store and KMS and Runtime Configuration.

Networking, gateways and VPN — VPC Networking, Route 53, DNS and ACM Certificates, Load Balancers and Gateways, API Gateway, and VPN and Hybrid Connectivity.

Email and integration — Sending Email with Amazon SES and Messaging and Integration.

Operations, governance and beyond — Monitoring and Observability, Governance, Security and Compliance, Cost Management and Support, Architecture, Migration, Hybrid and Disaster Recovery, AI, Data and Analytics Services Overview, and Developer Tools and DevOps.

Download the AWS Cheat Sheet (PDF)