AWS Cloud Services Architecture Matrix Cheat Sheet

Instant decision matrix mapping distributed system requirements to native AWS managed cloud services.

1. AWS Core Services Architecture Map

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Follow one request from the top. At the edge, Route 53 picks the region, CloudFront serves anything cacheable, and WAF drops malicious traffic, so only real work reaches the gateway. API Gateway or the ALB hands it to one of the compute styles in the "Compute Tier" panel: Fargate for long-running services, Lambda for event handlers, EC2 for full control. In the "Storage & Database Tier" panel, synchronous work reads and writes Aurora (transactions), DynamoDB (key lookups), S3 (files) or Redis (hot reads). Slow work is handed to the "Streaming & Asynchronous Processing" panel instead, SQS for tasks and Kinesis/MSK for event streams, so the request can return immediately, and messages that keep failing go to the DLQ instead of blocking the queue.

2. Compute Tier Selection Cheat Sheet

3. Database Selection Cheat Sheet

4. Messaging & Event Bus Decision Matrix

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Start at the top and answer two yes/no questions. First: must messages be processed in strict order? If yes, ask whether several independent consumers need the same messages: if they do, use Kinesis or MSK, where each consumer reads the ordered log at its own position; if only one consumer does, use SQS FIFO. If order does not matter, ask whether many services should each get a copy: if yes, use SNS or EventBridge to fan out; if not, SQS Standard is the simplest queue with nearly unlimited throughput. Ordering costs throughput (FIFO queues and shards have limits), so only choose it when the business logic really needs it.

5. Multi-Region Disaster Recovery Patterns

6. Related Resources

• Complete reference manual: AWS Reference Architecture Matrix
• Distributed components: Distributed Cache, Message Queue, Object Storage