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.
