Roadmap › 3. Cloud & DevOps › Step 40
AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) for .NET and Full Stack Developers
AWS fundamentals — regions and AZs, IAM, the shared responsibility model; compute (EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS/Fargate, EKS, Lambda, App Runner), storage (S3, EBS, EFS), databases (RDS for SQL Server, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache), networking (VPC, subnets, security groups, Route 53, CloudFront, ALB/NLB, API Gateway), messaging (SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis), security (KMS, Secrets Manager, Cognito, WAF), monitoring (CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail), infrastructure as code (CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform), CI/CD (CodePipeline, GitHub Actions), deploying .NET apps, cost management, the Azure ↔ AWS service map and AWS interview questions.
What it is & where it is used
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest public cloud provider (since 2006), with 200+ services across 30+ regions. As a .NET/full stack developer you mainly need: IAM, compute to run APIs, databases, storage, networking, messaging, monitoring and deployment automation.
Azure ↔ AWS ↔ GCP service map:
| Need | Azure | AWS | GCP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virtual machines | Virtual Machines | EC2 | Compute Engine |
| Web app PaaS | App Service | Elastic Beanstalk, App Runner | App Engine, Cloud Run |
| Containers (serverless) | Container Apps | ECS on Fargate, App Runner | Cloud Run |
| Kubernetes | AKS | EKS | GKE |
| Functions | Azure Functions | Lambda | Cloud Functions / Cloud Run functions |
| Object storage | Blob Storage | S3 | Cloud Storage |
| Managed SQL Server | Azure SQL / Managed Instance | RDS for SQL Server | Cloud SQL for SQL Server |
| Cloud-native relational | Azure SQL Hyperscale / PostgreSQL | Aurora (MySQL/PostgreSQL) | AlloyDB, Spanner |
| NoSQL | Cosmos DB | DynamoDB | Firestore, Bigtable |
| Cache | Azure Cache for Redis | ElastiCache / MemoryDB | Memorystore |
| Queue / pub-sub | Service Bus, Storage Queues / Event Grid | SQS / SNS, EventBridge | Pub/Sub |
| Streaming | Event Hubs | Kinesis, MSK (Kafka) | Pub/Sub, Dataflow |
| API gateway | API Management | API Gateway | API Gateway / Apigee |
| CDN | Front Door / CDN | CloudFront | Cloud CDN |
| DNS | Azure DNS | Route 53 | Cloud DNS |
| Identity for apps | Entra ID / B2C | Cognito | Identity Platform |
| Access control | Entra ID + RBAC | IAM | Cloud IAM |
| Secrets | Key Vault | Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, KMS | Secret Manager, Cloud KMS |
| Monitoring | Azure Monitor / App Insights | CloudWatch, X-Ray | Cloud Monitoring/Logging/Trace |
| IaC | ARM / Bicep | CloudFormation, CDK | Deployment Manager → Infrastructure Manager (Terraform) |
| CI/CD | Azure DevOps | CodePipeline / CodeBuild / CodeDeploy | Cloud Build / Cloud Deploy |
Versions & history
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2006 | S3 and EC2 launch — AWS public cloud begins |
| 2008–2009 | EBS, CloudFront, RDS (MySQL first), VPC |
| 2010–2012 | Route 53, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk (.NET support 2012), DynamoDB, RDS for SQL Server |
| 2014 | Lambda, Aurora, ECS, KMS |
| 2015–2017 | API Gateway, Elastic Container Registry, Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL |
| 2018 | EKS, Lambda custom runtimes |
| 2019–2021 | Graviton (ARM) instances, CDK GA, App Runner, Lambda container images |
| 2022–2024 | Lambda SnapStart, .NET 8 Lambda runtime, Amazon Q (AI assistant), Bedrock (generative AI) |
| 2025 | .NET 10 support on Lambda/Beanstalk, continued AI services (Bedrock agents), Aurora DSQL |
Lifecycle
Deploying a .NET API to AWS (typical path):
- Account setup — organisation, root user locked down with MFA, IAM Identity Center users/roles, budgets.
- Network — a VPC with public subnets (load balancer) and private subnets (app, database) across 2–3 AZs.
- Data — RDS for SQL Server (Multi-AZ) or Aurora PostgreSQL in private subnets; credentials in Secrets Manager.
- Compute — container image in ECR → ECS Fargate service behind an Application Load Balancer (or Elastic Beanstalk / Lambda).
- Edge — Route 53 DNS → CloudFront (CDN, TLS via ACM certificate) → ALB.
- CI/CD — GitHub Actions/CodePipeline: build, test, push image, deploy new task definition.
- Operate — CloudWatch logs/metrics/alarms, X-Ray/OpenTelemetry traces, CloudTrail audit, cost alerts.
Tools used to develop
- AWS Management Console, AWS CLI (
aws configure,aws s3 ls), AWS Tools for PowerShell. - AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio / VS Code / Rider; AWS SDK for .NET (
AWSSDK.S3,AWSSDK.DynamoDBv2…);Amazon.Lambda.AspNetCoreServerto run ASP.NET Core on Lambda;dotnet lambdaCLI. - IaC: CloudFormation, AWS CDK (C#/TypeScript), Terraform, SAM (serverless).
- Containers: ECR, Copilot CLI, Docker.
- Learning: AWS Skill Builder, AWS Free Tier, Well-Architected Framework.