AWS Services and Alternative Architectures

June 10, 2026

Overview

I've been exploring AWS recently and noticed many similarities between traditional Spring Boot enterprise environments and the managed services AWS provides.

One takeaway so far is that AWS consolidates many capabilities that would traditionally require multiple vendors and platforms.

Key Distinctions

Monitoring & Observability

AppDynamics / Splunk → AWS monitoring services

AWS provides centralized logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting through services such as CloudWatch, reducing the need for separate monitoring platforms.

Databases

Redis / Cassandra / Oracle → AWS managed databases

AWS offers managed database services that remove much of the operational overhead associated with hosting and maintaining database infrastructure.

Application Hosting

Deploying applications to Unix servers via CI/CD → AWS compute services

Applications can be deployed to EC2 instances, while S3 stores application assets and files. Lambda can execute event-driven code without provisioning servers, providing an alternative to traditional application hosting models.

AWS Lambda

Runs code in response to events without managing servers. AWS handles scaling and infrastructure management automatically.

Amazon S3

Object storage for files, static assets, backups, and application data.

Amazon DynamoDB

A fully managed NoSQL database designed for high availability, low latency, and automatic scaling.

Amazon EC2

Virtual machines in the cloud that provide full control over the operating system and runtime environment.

Amazon Bedrock

A managed service for building AI applications using foundation models from multiple providers through a unified API, without managing the underlying model infrastructure.