Selecting the appropriate infrastructure is a critical decision for cloud developers. This educational module provides a comprehensive comparison of AWS compute services, guiding developers through the spectrum from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Function as a Service (FaaS). The content details Amazon EC2 for legacy and custom runtime needs, AWS Lambda for event-driven serverless tasks, and container services like ECS and EKS for portable, consistent environments.

It highlights key operational differences, emphasizing that while EC2 offers full OS control and requires manual scaling configuration via Auto Scaling Groups, Lambda provides automatic scaling with strict execution time limits. The guide also covers essential security practices, specifically the use of IAM roles over static credentials for EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and ECS tasks. By addressing pricing models—hourly rates for EC2 versus pay-per-invocation for Lambda—this resource helps developers optimize costs while ensuring their application architecture aligns with specific scaling and availability requirements.