When one goes for a Cloud based solution with solution provider like Amazon AWS, there are 2 things which are important. One, you need to have a clarity on what you are trying to achieve, and second is understanding of the services being provided by the provider.

Both the aspects are equally important. AWS provides plethora of services which can amuse at the same time confuse one. You might be tempted to use services which might not be required for your project and unnecessarily adds to the cost. At the same time if services not used with proper understanding, can backfire in terms of output and cost. For example, in one of my projects, incorrect implementation of autoscaling ended up running unused servers adding to cost instead of saving it.

Additionally, one need to be aware of all the capabilities of the service provider, for example, what all database and backup services we can use, can we use caching services, monitoring services provided by the service provider. Otherwise you will end up putting in unnecessary effort in rebuilding the wheel.

Here is a good starting point for AWS usage –