We Ranked Every AWS Service We Actually Use

AWS FOR THE REAL WORLD

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Reading time: 4 minutes

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Main Learning: Which AWS services are worth your time and which ones to skip

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Hey Reader 👋🏽

a new week, new AWS video coming out. I (Sandro) used all of my knowledge from the past six plus years building AWS solutions, ranking the services I actually use and the services I hate.

For some I've changed my mind A LOT over the years (e.g. DynamoDB).

Let me know what you think and check it out.
Here you go

AWS News

But first of all, what happened that week? Believe us, some interesting stuff!

📰 This Week in AWS

⚠️App Runner Deprecation... Then Revoked?

AWS published a migration guide from App Runner to ECS — basically admitting the service is done. Then they removed the article. The link now returns a 400 error. Classic AWS communication. Either way: don't use App Runner. Use ECS instead.

⚡Lambda Now Supports Availability Zone Metadata

You can now determine which Availability Zone your Lambda function runs in. Interesting timing — could this be related to recent regional outages? Not sure, but it's a useful feature for debugging and understanding your Lambda placement. Especially relevant for latency-sensitive workloads.

🔧CloudWatch Logs Now Supports HTTP-Based Ingestion

Fun fact: this was technically always possible with signed AWS requests. But apparently that was too complicated for most use cases. Now you can create a bearer token that handles IAM auth for you and stream logs via a simple HTTP API. This is huge for third-party integrations and moving external logs into CloudWatch without the SDK hassle.

A new startup launched 🚀

Personal Recommendation

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This is not a sponsor — we work together with Blocks and genuinely love what they do. They take a completely different approach to AWS costs. Once you join, you save 20% on your cloud bill. Guaranteed. On top of that, you get Major Tom — a DevOps chatbot right in your Slack. It doesn't just analyze your AWS usage and alarms, it helps you with automated actions to actually fix things.

Check Out Blocks →

Not a sponsor. We work with Blocks and recommend them because we use them ourselves.

Now to the Tier List… 📊

Spoiler 👀

📚 This Week's Deep Dive

I ranked every AWS service I actually use. 23 services, from S tier to F tier. After 6+ years of building production apps, startups, and enterprise systems — this is my honest take.

Here's the full breakdown:

S Tier — Can't Live Without

Lambda — The OG serverless service. Defined what serverless is. Durable functions, managed instances, every runtime. I use it daily. Still underrated.
S3 — Might be the best cloud service ever built. Even AWS haters like DHH still use it. S3 Vectors, lifecycle rules, event notifications — it just works.

A Tier — These Are Great

EventBridge — Built an entire event-driven architecture on it. Millions of events/month. Event bus + targeting rules are beautiful. Schema discovery sucks though.
ECS — Most underrated AWS service. When Lambda gets too expensive, ECS + Fargate is your next stop.
EC2 — Backbone of everything. Lambda, ECS, Beanstalk — all EC2 under the hood.
CloudFront — Insanely good CDN. Why not S tier? Deployment times are painfully slow.
IAM — If you've worked with Azure or Cloudflare permissions, you know IAM is a gift.

B Tier — Solid Services

API Gateway — Custom authorizers are incredible. Direct integrations are weirdly implemented.
SQS — First AWS service ever launched. I built a startup around it (ServerlessQ). Scales like crazy but steep learning curve.
AppSync — GraphQL without Apollo servers. Shipped it to 100M requests/month.
Bedrock Agent Core — Agent runtimes, MCP gateways, built-in tools. Could become THE AI agent infrastructure. Not to be confused with Bedrock.
RDS — It's Postgres. It works. Need a VPC, which is annoying.

C Tier — Good But Frustrating

CloudWatch — I wrote a book about it. Still C tier. Capabilities are amazing, UX is painful.
Step Functions — Amazing for wait-for-callback. Everything else: just write Lambda code.
Aurora DSQL — Hyped. Building my wedding website on it. "Postgres compatible" is not Postgres.
Bedrock — Foundation models, guardrails, knowledge bases. Rate limits are insane though.
Lightsail — Your Hetzner on AWS. Great for shipping fast.
Organizations — You need it. Learning curve is steep.

D Tier — Good Service, Wrong Choice

DynamoDB — Hot take. Two years ago it was A tier. But your data is relational. Your life is relational. Just use Postgres.
CloudFormation — Foundation of IaC on AWS. But resource limits, drift detection, rollbacks — SST switched to Pulumi for a reason.

E Tier — It Works, But...

Cognito — Cheap and integrated everywhere. But user pools, identity pools, federation — the complexity is insane. Use Better Auth instead.

F Tier — Avoid

App Runner — Great idea, nobody home. No WebSocket, no updates, sunset notice published then removed.
Elastic Beanstalk — In every certification, used by nobody. A relic.

Disagree with any of these? Watch the full video and drop a comment. I want to hear your ranking.

🎬 Watch the Full Tier List →

That's it for this week! Tobi & I are actually meeting this week, planning videos ahead, and playing Squash.
If you have any suggestion on upcoming topics ➡️ drop us an email!
Agree or disagree with my tier list? Reply to this email or drop a comment on the video — I read all of them.
See you soon!

Sandro & Tobi

AWS for the Real World