Compute

The operational depth behind AWS's three load balancer types — path/host-based routing on ALB, extreme throughput and static IPs on NLB, and transparent traffic inspection with Gateway Load Balancer — and how to choose correctly between them.

The specific scaling policy types and termination behaviors behind an Auto Scaling Group — manual, scheduled, dynamic, and predictive scaling, plus how ASG decides which instance to terminate when scaling in.

Coordinating multiple Lambda functions and AWS services into a reliable, visual, stateful workflow — retries, error handling, parallel branches, and human-approval steps without custom orchestration code.

Amazon's core virtual server service — AMIs, instance types, and the purchase options that trade commitment for discount.

How traffic to and from an EC2 instance is controlled — Security Groups, public vs private IPs, and the VPC context an instance lives in.

Automatically matching EC2 capacity to real demand, and distributing traffic across that capacity so no single instance is a bottleneck or a single point of failure.

Running code without managing any servers at all — Lambda's execution model, triggers, and when serverless beats EC2.

Two compute services at opposite ends of the simplicity spectrum from raw EC2 — Lightsail for a simple, predictable-priced starting point, and Batch for fire-and-forget large-scale job processing.