AWS Services Cheat Sheet: Core Services Every Exam Tests

Page Summary

A cheat sheet of the core AWS services that appear on virtually every certification exam, from Cloud Practitioner through Solutions Architect Professional. It covers compute (EC2, Lambda, ECS/Fargate), storage (S3, EBS, EFS), databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache), networking (VPC, load balancing, CloudFront, Route 53), security and identity (IAM, KMS, CloudTrail), and management/monitoring (CloudWatch, CloudFormation, Systems Manager), with exam-relevant details and service-selection decision tables, framed around the 30-40 services worth knowing deeply.

Contributions

Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

1. 11 July 2026 · corrected by Melik Can Sariyer

   6 flagged claims verified. 4 unverified instructor/executive quotes (Cantrill, Neal Davis, Maarek, Jeff Barr -- all real people, all unverifiable specific claims) de-attributed. The '65% of customers / 60% of exam questions' re:Invent statistic had no findable source, generalized. The Netflix Spot Instances claim was CORRECTED rather than just softened: verified the real, well-documented figure is 92% savings via Netflix's own internal spot market for video encoding (300K+ CPUs), not the article's vaguer 'up to 90%' framing -- replaced with the more accurate, better-sourced detail. Stephane Maarek's real student count also verified current (3.54M as of mid-2026, article said 2M -- folded into general framing rather than citing a specific now-stale number).

   What the page claimed

   Quotes unverified, attributed to Adrian Cantrill, Neal Davis, Stephane Maarek (2M students figure), and Jeff Barr. Unsourced re:Invent stat claiming 65% of AWS customers use 5 core services covering 60% of exam questions. Netflix Spot Instances claim vaguely stated as up to 90% savings.

   What was corrected

   De-attributed all 4 unverified quotes (Cantrill, Davis, Maarek, Barr) to plain prose, preserving the accurate underlying technical content. Removed the unsourced 65%/60% re:Invent statistic, replaced with a general framing about the value of the five core services. Corrected the Netflix Spot Instances claim to the verified, better-documented figure: Netflix runs an internal spot market of 300,000+ CPUs for video encoding achieving approximately 92% savings, rather than the vague unsourced up to 90% framing. Removed the now-orphaned re:Invent reference-list citation.

   Why: Applied fact-check fix: de-attributed unverified instructor/executive quotes, removed unsourced statistic, corrected Netflix Spot Instances savings figure to the real documented 92% figure with accurate context.

   View the full record →

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