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💡 First Principle: You are not expected to operate every AWS service, but you are expected to recognize which category of problem each one solves - the exam asks you to pick the right tool for a described need, not to configure it.
The sections above teach the core services in depth. This reference covers the remaining services named in the official CLF-C02 exam guide, grouped by the same categories AWS uses. Read it for recognition rather than memorization: for each service, anchor on the one problem it exists to solve. That is enough to reason your way through a scenario question about a service you have never used.
Analytics
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| Amazon Athena | Run standard SQL queries directly against data sitting in Amazon S3, with no server to run or data to load first. |
| Amazon EMR | Run big-data frameworks such as Apache Spark and Hadoop on a managed cluster for large-scale processing. |
| Amazon Kinesis | Collect and process streaming data (logs, clickstreams, telemetry) as it arrives rather than in nightly batches. |
| Amazon OpenSearch Service | Search, filter, and visualize log and document data at scale. |
| Amazon QuickSight | Build business-intelligence dashboards and visualizations for non-technical stakeholders. |
Application Integration
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) | A managed message queue that decouples components so a slow or failed consumer cannot take the producer down with it. |
| Amazon EventBridge | Route events between AWS services and SaaS applications using rules, enabling event-driven architectures. |
| AWS Step Functions | Coordinate multiple services into a visual workflow with built-in retries and error handling. |
Business Applications
Compute and Containers
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| Amazon Lightsail | A simplified virtual private server with predictable bundled pricing, aimed at simple workloads and newcomers to AWS. |
| AWS Batch | Schedule and run large numbers of batch computing jobs, provisioning compute automatically. |
| Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) | Store, manage, and deploy your container images, in the way that Amazon S3 stores objects. |
Database
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| Amazon ElastiCache | An in-memory cache (Redis or Memcached) that absorbs repeated reads so the database behind it is not hit every time. |
| Amazon DocumentDB | A managed document database compatible with MongoDB workloads. |
| Amazon Neptune | A managed graph database for highly connected data such as social networks and fraud rings. |
Developer Tools
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| AWS CodeBuild | Compile source code, run tests, and produce deployable artifacts without managing a build server. |
| AWS CodePipeline | Model and automate the release process end to end, from source through build to deployment. |
| AWS X-Ray | Trace a single request as it crosses multiple services to find where latency or errors originate. |
End-User Computing and Front End
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| Amazon WorkSpaces | Provision managed virtual desktops so staff can work from any device without company data leaving AWS. |
| Amazon AppStream 2.0 | Stream a single desktop application to a browser instead of delivering a full desktop. |
| AWS Amplify | Build and host web and mobile front ends with the backend services they depend on. |
| Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser | Give users a managed, isolated browser for reaching internal web applications without provisioning a full desktop. |
| AWS AppSync | Serve application data through a managed GraphQL API. |
Internet of Things
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| AWS IoT Core | Connect fleets of devices to the cloud and route their messages to other AWS services securely. |
Machine Learning and AI
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| Amazon SageMaker AI | Build, train, and deploy your own machine learning models. The choice when a pre-trained service does not fit. |
| Amazon Rekognition | Analyze images and video for objects, faces, text, and unsafe content. |
| Amazon Textract | Extract text, forms, and tables from scanned documents, going beyond simple character recognition. |
| Amazon Comprehend | Find sentiment, entities, key phrases, and language in unstructured text. |
| Amazon Transcribe | Convert speech in audio and video into written text. |
| Amazon Polly | Convert written text into lifelike speech. The mirror image of Transcribe. |
| Amazon Lex | Build conversational chatbots and voice interfaces using the technology behind Alexa. |
| Amazon Kendra | Provide natural-language search across an organization's internal documents. |
| Amazon Q | A generative AI assistant that answers questions and performs tasks grounded in your business data and AWS environment. |
Management and Governance
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| AWS Systems Manager | Operate fleets of instances at scale: apply patches, run commands, and store configuration and secrets centrally. |
| AWS Control Tower | Set up and govern a secure multi-account environment against AWS best practices from a single place. |
| AWS Service Catalog | Publish a curated list of approved products so teams can self-serve only what the organization has sanctioned. |
| AWS Health Dashboard | Show the health of AWS services generally and any events affecting your specific account and resources. |
| AWS Compute Optimizer | Recommend right-sized resources by analyzing how your workloads actually use them. |
| AWS License Manager | Track and enforce software license usage to stay within your vendor agreements. |
| AWS Well-Architected Tool | Review a workload against the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework and get improvement recommendations. |
| Service Quotas | View the per-service, per-Region limits on your account and request increases from one place, rather than hunting for each service's own limit page. |
Migration and Transfer
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| AWS Snow Family | Ship physical devices to move petabyte-scale data when transferring it over a network would take too long. |
| AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) | Migrate databases to AWS with the source database staying available during the migration. |
| AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) | Convert a database schema from one engine to another. Used alongside DMS when the engines differ. |
| AWS Application Discovery Service | Inventory on-premises servers and their dependencies to plan a migration. |
| Migration Evaluator | Build the business case for migrating: it projects what your current on-premises estate would cost on AWS. Discovery Service tells you what you have; Migration Evaluator tells you what it would cost. |
| AWS Application Migration Service | Lift and shift physical, virtual, or cloud servers to AWS with minimal changes. |
| AWS Migration Hub | Track the progress of a migration across multiple AWS and partner tools in one dashboard. |
Networking and Content Delivery
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| AWS Global Accelerator | Route users over the AWS global network to the healthiest endpoint using static IP addresses. Improves performance for non-cacheable traffic, where CloudFront caches content. |
| AWS Site-to-Site VPN | Create an encrypted tunnel between an on-premises network and a VPC over the public internet. |
| AWS Client VPN | Give individual remote users secure access to AWS and on-premises networks. |
| AWS Transit Gateway | Connect many VPCs and on-premises networks through a single hub instead of a mesh of peering connections. |
| AWS PrivateLink | Reach AWS or partner services privately from your VPC without traversing the public internet. |
Storage
| Service | What it does and when you would choose it |
|---|
| Amazon FSx | Fully managed third-party file systems, including FSx for Windows File Server (SMB) and FSx for Lustre (high-performance computing). |
| AWS Storage Gateway | Give on-premises applications access to cloud storage while keeping frequently used data cached locally. |
| AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery | Continuously replicate servers into AWS so they can be brought up quickly after an outage. |
