Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s cloud computing platform. EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, and S3 are four of its most widely used services, and candidates who list this combination on a resume are typically describing experience deploying, managing, and monitoring applications and infrastructure in the AWS cloud.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides resizable virtual servers, called instances, that run applications in the cloud without the need to buy or maintain physical hardware.
RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed relational database service that handles time consuming database administration tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, and recovery, for engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others.
CloudWatch is AWS’s monitoring and observability service. It collects logs, metrics, and events from AWS resources so teams can track application health, set alarms, and respond to issues quickly.
S3 (Simple Storage Service) is scalable object storage used to store and retrieve any amount of data, such as backups, static website assets, or application files.
A candidate experienced across EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, and S3 can typically handle a full, common slice of cloud infrastructure work: standing up compute resources, managing the databases behind an application, monitoring that infrastructure for problems, and storing the data and assets the application depends on. This combination shows up often in cloud engineer, DevOps engineer, site reliability engineer, and backend engineer job descriptions, so it is a useful skill tag to screen for when hiring across those roles.
What is AWS EC2 used for?
EC2 is used to run virtual servers in the cloud, giving teams on demand, scalable compute capacity for applications without managing physical hardware.
What is the difference between AWS RDS and just running a database on EC2?
RDS is a managed database service, so AWS handles patching, backups, and failover, while running a database directly on an EC2 instance means the team is responsible for managing all of that themselves.
What does AWS CloudWatch monitor?
CloudWatch monitors metrics, logs, and events across AWS resources, helping teams track performance and set alarms so they can respond to problems before they affect users.
Why would a recruiter look for AWS S3 experience specifically?
S3 experience signals a candidate understands how to store and manage data and assets at scale in the cloud, which is a common requirement for roles that involve backups, static assets, or data pipelines.
Glider AI’s skill assessment platform lets you validate hands on AWS experience, including EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, and S3, before a candidate ever reaches a final interview.
