Essential AWS Services

The Services a Web Developer Needs: EC2, EBS, S3, RDS, Route 53, CloudFront and Lightsail

A LAMP site touches about seven of AWS 24 's two hundred-plus services:

The AWS services a LAMP developer meets first
Service What it is LAMP role See
EC2 24 Virtual machines Runs Apache 129 , PHP and, at first, MySQL 524 Amazon EC2
EBS 24 Network block disks The server's root and data volumes EBS Volumes and Snapshots
S3 Object storage Uploads, backups, static assets S3 and Scoped Disks
RDS 24 Managed databases MySQL with backups and patching done for you Amazon RDS for MySQL
Route 53 24 DNS and domains Points example.com at the server Elastic IPs, DNS and Route 53
CloudFront 24 CDN Caches static files near visitors Below
Lightsail 24 Fixed-price servers Server, disk and IP for one fee Below

Start with one EC2 instance running everything, then move the database to RDS, uploads to S3 and static files behind CloudFront as traffic grows. Lightsail bundles a server into one price; its smallest Linux plan with IPv4 was USD 5 a month on 23 September 2026 (2 vCPUs, 1 GB memory, 40 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer), but offers far fewer choices than EC2. CloudFront's flat-rate Free plan covers 1 million requests and 100 GB a month with no overage charges.