My Top 5 Favorite AWS Services (Right Now)

- 4 minutes read - 786 words

Every engineer has their favorites. Not necessarily the most popular services or the ones that show up in every architecture diagram, just the ones that make your day better when you get to work with them. These are mine, right now, in no particular order.

AWS ECS/AWS Fargate

If you’ve ever managed EC2 instances just to run containers, you know the relief that comes with Fargate. No patching the underlying host. No capacity planning headaches. You define your task, point it at your container image, and let AWS handle the rest.

I’ve been deep in ECS/Fargate lately migrating legacy workloads off old school infrastructure and into containerized deployments. The combination of ECS for orchestration and Fargate for serverless compute hits a sweet spot. You get real control over how your containers run without babysitting servers. Add in service discovery, load balancer integration, and tight IAM controls, and it just works.

It’s not perfect. Debugging task failures can be a scavenger hunt through CloudWatch, and the networking model has a learning curve. But once it clicks, it’s hard to imagine going back.

AWS Amplify

This one is personal. My blog runs on it. Amplify takes a static site (Hugo in my case), connects it to a Git repo, and handles the build and deploy pipeline automatically. Push to your branch, Amplify picks it up, builds it, and deploys it. That’s it.

For someone who spends all day building infrastructure for other people’s applications, there’s something satisfying about a service that just handles it for you. Custom domains, HTTPS, CI/CD, all baked in without writing a single pipeline config. It’s the fastest path from “I have a repo” to “I have a live website” that I’ve found in AWS.

AWS Lambda

Lambda is one of those services that keeps showing up in solutions whether you planned for it or not. Need to process an S3 event? Lambda. Need a quick API endpoint? Lambda. Need to glue two services together with a bit of logic? Lambda.

What I appreciate most is how it forces you to think small. You write a function, it does one thing, and it scales without you thinking about it. The cold start conversation is overblown for most use cases, and the pricing model is genuinely hard to beat for event driven workloads. I’ve used it for everything from automation scripts to lightweight data processing, and it consistently delivers.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets

Okay, StackSets aren’t technically their own service. They’re a feature of CloudFormation. But if you manage multiple AWS accounts, they deserve their own spot on any list.

StackSets let you deploy CloudFormation templates across multiple accounts and regions from a single operation. In a multi account environment, this is a game changer. Need to push a new IAM policy, a security baseline, or a patch management config to every account in your organization? One template, one deployment, done.

I’ve used them for everything from automated patching solutions to organization wide guardrails. The integration with AWS Organizations makes targeting specific OUs straightforward, and the drift detection helps you sleep at night knowing your accounts haven’t deviated from baseline. If you’re running an AWS Organization and not using StackSets, you’re working too hard.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

This might be a controversial pick in 2026, but I still think Elastic Beanstalk has a place. It catches a lot of criticism for being a “legacy” service, but it does something that a surprising number of AWS services still don’t do well. It gives you a fully managed application environment without requiring you to become an expert in the underlying infrastructure first.

Beanstalk handles provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and monitoring out of the box. You can still customize everything under the hood with .ebextensions and platform hooks when you need to, but the defaults are solid for getting something up and running. For teams that need to ship an application without building out a full ECS or Kubernetes stack, it’s a legitimate option.

Is it what I’d reach for on a greenfield project today? Probably not. ECS/Fargate has taken that spot for me. But for certain workloads and certain teams, Beanstalk still earns its keep.

Wrapping Up

This list will probably look different six months from now. That’s the nature of working in AWS. Your favorites shift as your projects shift. But right now, these five are the services that I find myself reaching for, recommending, and genuinely enjoying working with.

What are yours? I’d love to hear what’s on your list.

I’m a Staff Site Reliability Engineer and I get busy with AWS, GitHub, Terraform, and VS Code, among other things. If you’re feeling it, subscribe below. Want to connect? Find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, or X.

Share: