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.

Learn how placement groups control physical instance placement for network performance or fault isolation, how tenancy options trade cost against compliance isolation, and how purchase options turn EC2 pricing into a financial decision rather than a technical afterthought.

Learn to manage EC2 instances from the command line instead of the console — configuring credentials and profiles, launching, describing, and terminating instances, and filtering output with JMESPath queries — the foundation for any automation or scripting workflow.